The New York Times may have just solved John McCain’s problem with the GOP right for him:
Rush Limbaugh, who has been critical of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), embraced him today now that they have a common enemy: The New York Times.
Limbaugh and other conservative commentators rushed to defend McCain on Thursday against a potentially damaging article in The New York Times, embracing a maverick they have often attacked.
“You’re surprised that Page Six-type gossip is on the front page of The New York Times?” Limbaugh asked as he began his radio show. “Where have you been? How in the world can anybody be surprised?”
(…)
Laura Ingraham, another influential conservative radio host, asserted that the Times waited until McCain was on the brink of the Republican presidential nomination and now is seeking to “contaminate” him with an article that she calls “absurd” and “ridiculous.”
CBN.org, the website of the Christian Broadcasting Network, calls an attack by the Times “a conservative badge of honor.”
Ironically, a potentially damaging article about McCain may help bond him to conservatives, who are relishing the fact that now he needs them.
“Is he going to learn the right lesson from this?” Limbaugh asked. “The lesson is that liberals are to be defeated.”
Limbaugh wrote in an e-mail to Politico: “The story is not the story. The story is the drive-by media turning on its favorite maverick and trying to take him out. The media picked the GOP’s candidate, the NYT endorsed him while they sat on this story, and is now, with utter predictability, trying to destroy him.”
Limbaugh added: “This is what you get when you walk across the aisle and try to make these people your friends. I’m not surprised in the least that the NYT would try to take out John McCain. Predicted this, in fact, way back in the early 2000s. Sen. McCain courted the media, cultivated them, even bragged that the media was his ‘base.’ I cringed when I heard it because the media turning on McCain was as predictable as the sun rising in the morning.”
The irony of Limbaugh and the other talk radio hosts who were attacking McCain just two weeks ago now defending him is overpowering.
