Limbaugh, Obama, Stalin and Leadership

Over at Townhall, Frank Turek weighs in with an excellent piece. Read the whole thing, it's well worth the time. Some highlights:

Who is the current leader of the Republican Party? No one. But there certainly is someone who wields the most influence over people who agree with the Republican Party platform, and that is Rush Limbaugh .

How so? Because Limbaugh manages to do the three things any leader must do to be successful with a large group of people: he communicates direction, he earns trust, and he evokes desire in people to go in the direction he communicates. Those are the three fundamentals of leadership.

[snip]

Unfortunately, too many Republicans ignore these facts and the lessons of Reagan. They somehow think that Democrat-lite is their ticket to electoral popularity. It’s not—articulate conservativism is. As the 2008 election showed us, when Republicans offer neither, voters will settle for articulate.

Which leads us to where we are today. We have an articulate president whose direction is clearly wrong for the country. That’s not just an opinion. Obama’s direction is demonstrably wrong because it ignores the repeated lessons of history and adopts a false view of human nature. Socialism has never worked and will never work because it destroys human incentive and creates dependency.

Limbaugh says that Obama knows this and wants to create a culture of dependency that will keep Democrats perpetually in power. If this is true, Obama is taking a leadership page from Joseph Stalin.

While speaking to a group of henchmen one day, Stalin began denuding a chicken that struggled to get away. After Stalin finished the painful process, he placed the now-vulnerable bird at his feet and walked away while dropping breadcrumbs behind him. To everyone’s surprise, the bird he had just tortured followed the dictator around the room. The moral? Stalin gave it: “This is the way to rule the people,” he said. “Did you see how that chicken followed me for food, even though I had caused it such torture? People are like that chicken. If you inflict inordinate pain on them they will follow you for food the rest of their lives."

[snip]

[I]f Obama succeeds:

• We enter a depression because Obama raises taxes on those who provide the jobs—“the rich” (note to the President: the poor don’t hire anyone!);

• Thousands of more babies (and several mothers) will die from abortion and taxpayers will be paying the bill (the “Freedom of Choice Act”);

• Hundreds of religious hospitals will close (there are 664 Catholic hospitals in the U.S. alone), and thousands of doctors will resign, rather than be forced to provide abortions (so much for “choice”);

• Workers will have their right to a private union vote revoked (the deceptively-named “Employee Free Choice Act”);

• A few unelected justices in one state will impose their view of marriage on the nation’s three hundred million other citizens (Obama wants to gut the “Defense of Marriage Act”);

• Through the “Employment Non-Discrimination Act,” churches and private citizens will be forced to hire people who behave in ways that violate their religious and moral principles (so much for “tolerance”);

• Unprecedented debt and dependency will crush lives and incentive for generations to come.

For the sake of the country and our future, let’s hope Obama fails in these areas. I pray for the President, but I also pray that articulate conservatives in politics will begin to lead like conservatives in talk radio.