The American Spectator

Trouble with whom?

Neither Limbaugh nor Heaton are in trouble with a whole lot of people who are simply dismissed by those who, like professional borker and baby boomer Ralph Neas, shuttle between the coasts or gravitate mainly towards one of its major urban centers.

THIS KIND OF PROBLEM HAS surfaced before in American history. Two American presidents — LBJ and Richard Nixon, smart men both — could more than arguably have been said to suffer real inferiority complexes at the catcalls from their Ivy League or liberal elitist critics.

Yet there is a considerable difference today with all of this. It’s hard not to find a boomer involved in politics or Hollywood or the media who does not have, one way or the other, a very good education literally or certainly culturally. In short: there is no conservative out there involved in the political battles of the day who, LBJ or Nixon-like, has the slightest sense of intellectual or cultural insecurity in taking the stands that they do. They know their critics — well. They understand their liberal generational peers, as Limbaugh likes to kid, with every square inch of their gloriously naked bodies.

But is this kind of liberal animosity a good thing? Does it help educate, inform, or move a constructive and always needed dialogue forward when we are in the middle of a war for the nation’s survival? Of course not. Boomer Michael J. Fox is universally regarded as a nice guy. But if he didn’t understand what would happen before making his disingenuous commercial, certainly he should have gotten the point in the aftermath. Maybe he did and, sad to say, really was just interested in scoring a few political points for the home team. If that’s the reality of Michael J. Fox, the nice guy disappoints.

The good thing in all of this attempt to bork Rush (and make no mistake, the idea now and with his earlier drug addiction problem is to bork him so thoroughly it destroys not simply his arguments but his life — that’s what a borking is about) is that conservatives learned something as they grew into their conservatism.

In the War of the Boomers, what conservative boomers like Rush Limbaugh, Patricia Heaton, John Bolton, Rick Santorum, Clarence Thomas, George W. Bush and a boatload of others (think Condi) have going for them that drives mean-spirited critics like a Janet Charlton, Neil Gabler, Diane Sawyer, or Alec Baldwin to such foaming furies is this: they don’t give a damn.

And they smile, too.