Day: May 11, 2009

People that are social conservatives are also economic conservatives. But a lot of the economic conservatives are not social conservatives. Throw the social conservatives the pro-life, pro-family people overboard and the Republican party will be as irrelevant as the Whigs.

— Former presidential candidate and rock ‘n’ roller Mike Huckabee, in an interview with the Visalia Times-Delta

Readers of the political tea leaves may have missed it, but it appears that the new leadership team of the GOP in exile unofficially assumed control yesterday.

On Sunday’s CBS’ “Face the Nation,” ex-Vice Pres. Dick Cheney endorsed the authoritarian extremist ideology of hate-radio entertainer Rush Limbaugh over the liberal Republican views of his own former secretary of state, Colin Powell. By aligning himself with Limbaugh, Cheney may have put an end to months of public and private infighting and what Beltway observers have described as a circular firing squad among the right’s putative leaders.

Since leaving office in disgrace in January, Cheney has emerged from behind the wall of secrecy, silence and spin where he hid during the eight years he was on the public payroll to become the chief spokesman both for the project to rewrite the history of the Cheney-Bush regime and for the conservative movement, which is in shambles primarily, and paradoxically, because of the ineptitude of the administration Cheney controlled.

At the same time that Cheney has emerged from his famous undisclosed location, Limbaugh has established himself as the movement’s iron-fisted enforcer of ideological purity and punisher of party fatcats who dare to challenge his primacy and movement orthodoxy.

In choosing to align himself with Limbaugh, a drug-addicted draft dodger, Cheney — who himself received five deferments from serving in Vietnam on the basis that he had “other priorities” — rejected Powell, the former Army general and head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:

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