David Limbaugh's blog

Before moving on, I'd like to take one more stab at explaining the differing viewpoints of the opposing sides in the contentious internecine conservative debate over the debt ceiling and also assess the deal's winners and losers.

I honestly believe there were reasonable grounds for disagreement among conservatives concerning the best strategy and tactics to tackle what they agree — if all Democrats don't — to be a national debt crisis. By failing to cut one another slack, we'll only serve to divide our coalition and impede our shared agenda.

One of the most striking facts about the course of the Obama presidency so far is that Obama has no constructive solutions for anything, which is one reason he campaigned on vague promises. It's why he established bogus metrics, such as "saved or created jobs."

It's also why he's always pointing the finger of blame on others for his policy failures. Everyone knows by now that Obama's reckless and corrupt stimulus package failed to restrain unemployment as he had promised and that instead of accepting responsibility for it, he blamed Bush.

In the ongoing budget negotiations, it is becoming quite clear that President Obama, quite contrary to his posturing, is the major fly in the ointment.

Even the Democratic leadership is more flexible than President Obama, putting the lie to the oft-stated speculation that Obama is a mere puppet. He is his own counsel.

There is an overarching reason we can't move toward a balanced budget, which underscores why we face ongoing stalemates over debt ceilings and continuing resolutions: President Obama doesn't want to balance the budget.

I don't say this out of extremism or to be gratuitously controversial or even provocative. It's just that his words and actions lead to the inescapable conclusion that he is unwilling to curb his appetite for big government. In the absence of any such restraint, our alarming budget trajectory cannot be reversed. The debt ceiling may be the last clear chance before the 2012 elections to force meaningful budgetary reforms.

Ordinarily, I'd have difficulty grasping the magnitude of arrogance driving President Obama in budget negotiations that could determine the survival of our nation, but after several painful years of observation, I've come to expect it from him.

Obama's personality type does not well handle opposition, so when House Majority Leader Eric Cantor refused to budge on Obama's unreasonable demand that the GOP agree to raise taxes during these economic hard times, which would not raise revenues, Obama blew up and "stormed out of the room."

The depressing debate over the debt ceiling underscores just how recklessly the ruling class has squandered America's sacred heritage — a heritage I had the privilege of revisiting up close this past week on a family vacation.

The contrast between the sublime historical locations we experienced during the day and the alarming news we ingested each night about the dire state of our nation's financial condition couldn't have been starker.

Someone recently emailed and asked me to rebut the claim that fascism is a right-wing system.

I have given this question considerable thought over the years; even when I was in college, liberals routinely smeared conservatism as a fascist political ideology. Indeed, how many times have we heard the mantra that communism and Nazism represented the two extremes of the political spectrum, left and right, respectively? This never made sense to me, as I knew that conservatism championed political and economic liberty and that communism and fascism were the direct antithesis of these.

I am thankful that my friend Jonah Goldberg has written the definitive work on this subject and set the record straight, in his scholarly and entertaining "Liberal Fascism." I strongly recommend it.

I was disappointed that Chris Wallace asked Michele Bachmann whether she is a flake, but Wallace's behavior is hardly the most important issue involved. What he was trying to get at is another matter.

It is no secret that a good number of people regard Bachmann as a loose cannon who is given to gaffes and hyperbole. And it's not just Bachmann.

I'll make you a deal: I'll quit accusing Democrats of obstructing spending and entitlement reform when they quit obstructing spending and entitlement reform.

Now we even have the nonpartisan, sterile, unflappable Congressional Budget Office virtually predicting a "fiscal crisis," yet the Democratic Senate hasn't passed a budget for 785 days. There ought to be a law.

The left's assault on liberty never rests, so don't ever be sucked into supporting the dangerous idea of a new constitutional convention, even if its stated purposes purport to be limited.

Recently, CNN's Fareed Zakaria spoke admiringly of how "Iceland is actually junking its own constitution and starting anew and ... soliciting ideas from all of Iceland's 320,000 citizens, with the help of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube."

If you compare the Carter malaise with the Obama debt doomsday machine, any GOP 2012 presidential candidate should sail to victory with greater facility than Ronald Reagan did in 1980. But will she or he?

I am optimistic but also believe that in making his economic case, the Republican candidate will have different challenges because of the ongoing growth of our welfare state and the attitudes it has ushered in, along with heightened class warfare.

If I'd heard the following words, instead of reading them, I might have assumed they were being delivered by a President Obama impressionist on "Saturday Night Live."

But the words were from Obama himself in his latest weekly radio address. "I wish I could tell you there was a quick fix to our economic problems," he said. "But the truth is we didn't get into this mess overnight, and we won't get out of it overnight. It's going to take time."

Ann Coulter's chilling two-chapter recapitulation of the French Revolution is worth well more than the price of her new book, "Demonic," but that's just a bonus.

Also priceless are Coulter's plethora of one-liner skewerings of the liberal mob, but I digress. What make this her best book are her incisive demonstration that the revolution was the mother of the many totalitarian "revolutions" it spawned in the name of the people, her dissection of the mob mentality that drove it, and her case against today's American liberals as exemplars of this mob mentality.

The liberal media's most recent effort to turn Sarah Palin into a dolt over her version of Paul Revere, on which historians are now defending her, has prompted me to share with you some confusing points of European history I have recently re-encountered in my lay study of the subject.

With apologies in advance to professional and amateur historians, here are a few fun "facts."

Do you think it's conceivable that yet another round of dismal economic news might cause President Obama to finally dig deeply enough in his id to find some hidden humility and consider reversing course? Let's be serious.

Why should he do that when it's much easier — and more profitable politically — to just demonize Republicans?

My advice for the GOP: No more Mr. Nice Guy. No more putting the pretense of civility above the best interests of the nation. Democrats are playing cynical games with our national debt crisis, and it?s time they were called out on them — directly, volubly and repeatedly. Senate Democrats haven?t passed their own budget plan in more than two years, despite having strong control of that body. Meanwhile, the nation is teetering on bankruptcy.

I don?t make that statement lightly. Our national debt is $14.3 trillion, and our federal deficit is $1.65 trillion. This might be less shocking but for the facts that our projected annual deficits as long as Obama is in charge average $1 trillion, and our unfunded entitlements exceed $88 trillion.

Conservatives are worried that an ideal Reagan conservative has yet to emerge and lead the 2012 GOP presidential field. But are we allowing the liberal media (and establishment Republicans) to manipulate the narrative to prevent such a result?

Obviously, the liberal media do not have the best interests of Reagan conservatives in mind when they do their "reporting." So when they tell us certain GOP candidates are unelectable or electable, common sense would counsel us to take their advice with mounds of salt. But do we?

I think people are missing the main point of Obamacare's alleged "death panels": Obama has forfeited any claim to moral authority in pursuit of his so-called health care reform.

It is indisputable that the thrust of Obama's push for Obamacare was that too many Americans were being denied access to medical care, and that health care "should be a right for every American." He obviously believes insurance companies let his mother die in refusing to cover her medical bills because of her pre-existing condition.

Can you imagine how insufferable President Obama would be about his record in office if he actually had abundant positive accomplishments? Have we ever seen a starker contrast between a politician's record and his self-assessment of it?

It's not as though the president just avoids or downplays his failures. It's more like he showcases them, but only after completely revising history to put his actions in a favorable light.

The Washington Examiner reports that it's been 768 days since the Democratic-controlled Senate passed a budget. What's the big deal? It's not like the nation is facing financial difficulties or anything.

I realize it's convenient for President Obama to pretend he's a bystander on fiscal matters when it suits him and to pass the buck that never stops with him back to Congress, but how about a little leadership on the issue for a change?

We are living in strange times indeed when it's not laughable to suggest that President Obama will be difficult to beat in 2012. Well, I'm not buying it, even considering any positive (but inevitably temporary) surge Obama may receive with Osama bin Laden's death.

In 2008, as an economic crisis played into his hands, Obama ran against an uninspiring opponent in John McCain, campaigned on grandiose promises in lieu of a record, and cultivated and rode a mainstream media wave based on a myth of his messiahship. Yet he still only won with 53 percent of the vote.

The governing class in Washington has no excuse for not having addressed our spending issues and formulating a comprehensive federal debt retirement plan before we approached another debt ceiling threshold.

At every possible opportunity, politicians convince themselves that it's always better to kick the can down the road — Democrats because they aren't remotely serious about debt reduction, Republicans because they're afraid of their own shadow.

Everyone but the blind and reckless agrees that the United States faces a dire financial crisis. But only one of the two major political parties is offering a plan that has a reasonable chance of averting this crisis and restoring the nation to financial health.

Obama's ever-changing proposals, allegedly designed to tackle the problem, simply could not work. One of the following must be true: He doesn't agree that the crisis is grave, doesn't understand that his policies can't work, doesn't have the same vision about America as most of us, or doesn't intend for his policies to work. Some people believe he's intentionally damaging America, because they believe he's too smart not to know that we face a crisis and that his policies can't work.

I am beginning to wonder whether President Obama is so cocky about his 2012 re-election prospects that he thinks he doesn't even have to be serious in his budget plan offerings.

Unfortunately, the nation's unfunded liabilities aren't so casual as the president; they are growing by more than $10 trillion per year, which means that our looming debt crisis becomes far more problematic with each passing day.

In my book "Crimes Against Liberty," I described President Obama as dishonest, hyper-partisan, a bully, a narcissist and a hard-core left-wing ideologue. Anyone who thinks my description is exaggerated or too harsh didn't hear his Wednesday speech on the budget.

One might have expected that a newly elected president who had "inherited" such a disturbingly high deficit, a growing national debt, and a forecast of unfunded entitlements soon to explode because of baby boomer demographics alone would roll up his sleeves and tackle this deficit and debt problem.

The Republicans did not win this budget fight, but the cuts they were able to extract illustrate, ironically, that Democrats are finally on the defensive. Scorekeeping aside, we must build on this non-victory because it was also a Democratic retreat.

Last week, I argued that the GOP should not cave on the budget negotiations for many reasons, including that today is not 1995-96. Things are so much different now, especially because of the existential threat to the republic that the exploding national debt represents.

My brother, Rush, said on his program Thursday that Donald Trump, in taking the fight directly to President Obama, has provided a winning blueprint for defeating him in 2012.

Rush was referring to the way in which Trump — think what you will about him and his politics — has boldly challenged President Obama on a number of issues, including the notorious birth certificate fracas, obviously unconcerned about fallout from the liberal media.

Do you believe Rep. Paul Ryan when he says we only have a few years left to get our fiscal house in order, or we're going to face European-type austerity? How about the co-chairmen of the bipartisan deficit commission, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, who have essentially issued the same warning?

Have you taken a hard look at President Obama's 10-year budget with a view to whether it would marginally address the crisis? Are you aware of the gargantuan deficits it projects — averaging some $1 trillion per year — and that this is before considering the Congressional Budget Office's scoring that revealed that its projected cumulative deficits were understated by a staggering $2.3 trillion?

As my friends' kids leave the nest for their first year away at college, I think of the monolithic ideas with which they will surely be bombarded in an environment that is supposed to expose them to a variety of ideas. Are they prepared to resist the seductive but destructive message?

Liberal elites have dominated most university faculties for years, but it seems they've become bolder, more radical and more militant. It is not their ideas I fear, because Christianity and conservatism stand up to truth challenges. It is the moral preening, the politicization of academics, the peer pressure, the revisionist distortions and the potential discrimination against dissenters.

President Obama's decision to bomb Libya is not even so multilateral as President George W. Bush's decision to attack Iraq. Nor is it ultimately driven by humanitarian concerns — and certainly not by any vital U.S. national interest.

Despite Obama's vilification of Bush for his alleged unilateralism, "Obama's 'coalition of the willing,'" according to foreign policy reporter Josh Rogin, "is smaller than any major multilateral operation since the end of the Cold War." Obama's Libyan intervention is more unilateral than Dubya's in another respect, as well: Obama has brazenly refused even to consult Congress, much less seek its blessing.