The attacks on conservative talk radio

Let me ask the obvious question. Have these people ever heard of Thomas E. Dewey? How about Ronald Reagan?

It was, of course, Governor Dewey, he the moderate GOP governor of New York and two-time loser of presidential elections (the second time, 1948, famously losing in an upset to Harry Truman) who way back there in 1950 said that if GOP conservatives ever got their way “the Republicans would lose every election and the Democrats would win every election.” And it was Reagan, decades later (in December 1976 after yet another moderate Republican – Gerald Ford – had managed to lose yet another election he was supposed to win – who unerringly said the GOP’s problem was “fraternal order” Republicans who saw the party as a fraternity and not a political party based on conservative principles. (Reagan also announced he intended to re-build the GOP by inviting in Democrats and Independents of like-mind, which he proceeded to do over the objections of moderates. Hmmm how did that work out, anyway?)

The point, of course, is that while none of these people mentioned above (and there are plenty others in the “its all the fault of (fill-in-the-blank) Rush/Sean/Mark/Laura/Drudge/Breitbart etc etc etc” school of thought) seem to understand, their argument has been around long before any of them and most certainly long before conservative talk radio or Fox or Steve Bannon, Matt Drudge and Ann Coulter. Indeed, that Dewey speech was given at Princeton University in 1950, the year before Rush Limbaugh was even born.