How Many GOP Presidents Would Be Considered "Conservative" By Rush Limbaugh?

For Presidents Day:

Rush Limbaugh and the right-wing talk radio crowd have been doing a lot of talking lately about who is, and isn’t, a “conservative.” It’s not an unimportant argument, because how the word “conservative” is defined impacts how words like “moderate” and “liberal” are defined as well.

Were this the 1964 presidential campaign, John McCain would have been considered to the right of Barry Goldwater on many issues. Goldwater was considered a right-wing extremist at the time; Limbaugh and his ilk are working very hard to position McCain as a “moderate.”

What would that make Goldwater today? Certainly he was no fan of the religious right. And specifically, he was pro-choice. Those facts alone would prevent him from achieving the “conservative” imprimatur in today’s politics.

Limbaugh lays out his requirements this way:

I don’t want to have somebody who is pro-choice called a conservative. I don’t want to have somebody who is for tax increases, income tax increases, or opposes, more importantly, tax cuts, called a conservative. I don’t want to have anybody who stands in the way of individuals prospering on their own, triumphing on their own, called conservative.

Based on the current talk-radio definition of a conservative — the three-legged stool of religious conservative, military hawk and market fundamentalist — I wondered which presidents in our history actually might qualify as a “conservative” today. Looking just at Republican presidents, here’s what I found:

By definition, such a radical attempt to re-define what it means to be Republican, and to be “conservative,” is not conservative. It is a semantic putsch. It’s a lie. Don’t be fooled by it.

Happy Presidents Day.

Tags: Rush Limbaugh