Feb 19, 2021 
PREFACE: Today’s awesome piece is from the now notorious “Blondie”. That “100+ person staff ” that supplied the Stack of Stuff.
Blondie has her own Undeniable Truths of Life. Here are two…
#1 – All of Life’s Unsolvable Problems CAN be solved … with More Throw Pillows.
#2 – Political Think Tanks are the 2nd Biggest Joke in Politics. They are #2 behind, of course, The Congressional Black Caucus.
Ergo, as you will learn in this Special BlondieSays … any $$$ you are considering giving to “a Political Think Tank” should instead be invested in … Throw Pillows. … Enjoy!
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Think Tanks think You’re Stupid, but … 
They sure do want your $$$. If you DO send them $$$ … They are correct!
Thank you to so many of you who have reached out to offer condolences, flowers! and love to me after the death of Rush.
For you new people (gosh, there are many now!) who may not know, I grew up with Rush in Cape Girardeau, MO and somehow, we managed to remain friends for all of these years.
I am so deeply sad. To be frank, I never once in the past year questioned that he would beat this cancer. In hindsight, I know that’s goofy but, I guess, it is how I was coping.
I was not ready for his death. It hit me on my blind side. Now, I just don’t know what to do with my self, to quote that very old Dusty Springfield song.
So, here I am. Crying. A lot. Thinking about things …. And crying… And thinking.
.
When Rush gained national attention, he did so because there was a massive group of people in America being underserved by media.
Think on that. The same crap we are dealing with today is the reason Rush got a toe hold thirty years ago. When he started blasting it out on AM stations at NOON, an unheard of time for such a thing, to every little town full of small business people, farmers, traveling salesman, truck drivers, repair people; the silent majority heard things that they intuitively thought, now articulated in a way they understood.
Up until then, the only voices of conservatism was long forgotten Barry Goldwater, WaPo editorialist George Will, Reagan, who feebly left office in 1989 just as Rush started nationally in 1988, and William Buckley, the founder of the conservative magazine, National Review.
Buckley never spoke English. He spoke in this rare elite, effete, intellectual, Ivy League, eastern dialect that few normal people could understand or relate to. Almost no one did.
But, Rush…oh, Rush….could he speak our language, or what? He made the complex understandable to all who listened. He took those ideas of conservatism; small government, low taxes, individualism, constitutionalism, patriotism, entrepreneurialism, competition, self reliance, and framed them for an audience thirsty to have their beliefs somewhere other than inside their own heads. 
We were starving people being given the manna to survive. We sat in our cars on lunch hours, we planned trips to be able to listen, we tried to get shopping done during a commercial break, we had elaborate methods of taping the show, we shared the tapes, we had rooms in restaurants so we could all eat and listen together, we made our kids listen. Eventually, that voice was the most calming and reassuring sound, at 12:06 pm est.
With Rush came many changes. Some big, like the rebirth of AM radio and some small, like the invention of bumper music!
One of the big changes stimulated by Rush was the invention of the conservative Think Tank. In the early 1970s, in most ever state, a man of means would put money into a group to develop conservative ideas to be pushed at the state level to effect laws and governance. National Review became the national voice of conservatism. It is not a think tank but engaged in ideas thru its magazine and eventually the internet.
The think tanks had good success over their first 30 years and helped flip several states from decades of Dimocrat control to Republican control, North Carolina being one. They helped with the big win in 1994 with the Contract for America.
But after fighting the left for so long, they had no idea what to do when they actually won. So they did nothing. Hundreds of new elected conservatives went to their state legislatures with no back up. The think tanks should have been there to help them navigate the politics but they were not.
They published policy papers no one had time to read instead of giving them talking points and a strategy to advance legislation. They should have held them up when they came under fire. … And most importantly, they should have held them accountable.
VERY FEW state and federal politicians who have flopped left after campaigning right have been held accountable by ANYONE, least of all, any conservative think tank. How many times have we been screwed? Do not bother to try and count.
And then, came Trump. The think tanks and the National Review people told us
…Oh, this is bad. Trump is bad. Do not vote for this guy, he is crude. He, he, is not one of us. He uses simple words when he talks. His hair….DO NOT VOTE FOR HIM!
We true conservatives, who want to SOLVE problems, not endlessly talk about them, told the deep thinkers to pound sand and voted for Trump.
We did not listen to them. They have never forgiven us.
Even after their jobs disappeared, their magazines closed, their funding dried up, their TV appearances dwindled, their policy papers trashed-binned, they did not JOIN US. They blamed us.
ANYWAY….this is a long way of saying that..
You should stop reading, liking, sharing, subscribing to emails, blogs and podcasts, following on social media, and for God’s sake, Stop Giving Money to the National Review or its evil NC spawn The Locke Foundation and almost any other think tank in the country.
NOTE: You can find Victor Davis Hanson at his own website – http://victorhanson.com/ – or at AmericanGreatness. You DO NOT need to go to NRO. … VDH is Awesome.
These “Think Tanks” are totally meaningless to our political lives now. They are worthless circle jerks. Their budgets are millions of dollars that would be better spent anywhere else! Geeze, buy BitCoin!
We MUST realize who is on our side and who is not. National Review and Locke and the people they have spawned are NOT on our team. (There may be a handful of exceptions. Really. Like, FIVE.)
They lie to us to get our money. I, for one, am OVER BEING LIED TO by people who purport to be my friend.
“Wait! But, Blondie, didn’t you JUST last week tell us to stop supporting our beloved alma maters?” Yes. Yes, I did. It is our only recourse at the moment. Dry up their funds.
Save your money. We will need it for the fight ahead!
Here is a piece by Don Surber, a good person to follow, trashing a National Review columnist who trashed Rush. Seriously?
Quote: That is what really bugs the elitists. We realize we do not need them. National Review has never earned a nickel in its life. It lives on subsidies from rich folk… (often fleecing wealthy widows). Its writers have day jobs with think tanks. Who are also subsidized by rich folks and people like you.
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National Review trashes Rush Limbaugh
Don Surber—February 19 2021—
Liberals spent much of the last 2 days trashing Rush Limbaugh, so it was no surprise that National Review would join in. NR now stands for Never Rush.
Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote what his fellow NR-er Jim Geraghty said was a tribute to Mister Limbaugh. They are really weird over there.
Dougherty’s column — “Rush’s Place” — was subtitled, “Rush’s program, beamed into cars sitting in traffic across the nation, was a beacon telling millions of people, ‘You are not alone.’ It was also a turnoff for millions of others.”
Fact check: OF COURSE. Limbaugh turned off every freaking liberal in America. That was one of the things his listeners liked about him. He drew flak, which meant he was over the target.
And make no mistake, National Review knew what it was doing by running this column. If his first paragraph did not inform the editor of Dougherty’s belly full of bile for Limbaugh, the second one did.
The Never Rusher wrote, “Many conservatives who have loathed the Donald Trump era will look back on Limbaugh’s success with regret, realizing that the talk-radio revolution was the giant leap from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.”
No conservative loathes the Trump era. Real conservatives took a chance on the dude and hit the jackpot. He made America great again by bringing the working class back to the movement.
That is his sin. The Republican Establishment could tolerate Reagan’s appeal to the riff-raff, but Donald Trump was the last straw.
Paragraph 3 was so smug that it could have been written by a Prius driver.
Dougherty wrote, “For millions of other people, Rush Limbaugh was the largest impediment to embracing conservatism. I count myself in this group. I’m not Rush Limbaugh’s target audience and never was. At 14 years old, I bought and enjoyed Al Franken’s book Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations. I don’t think I would enjoy it now because I simply don’t care about mass-media figures the way I did then. I vividly remembered the controversy when Rush Limbaugh called Chelsea Clinton a dog. She was about my age. And I was a child! How evil could a guy be?”
Calling a man evil is a tribute?
In his very next sentence, Dougherty said, “I had to overcome Rush Limbaugh to become a conservative.”
That’s like saying you had to overcome Lincoln to free the slaves.
The column was a display of elitism, which is to say it was a display of ignorance.
He wrote, “It is obvious that voting blocs of 70 or 80 million Americans cannot be adequately represented by one face or one type of character.”
And yet 75 million people lined up behind Donald Trump on Election Day. They were so adequately represented for 4 years that they wanted 4 more.
That is what really bugs the elitists. We realize we do not need them. National Review has never earned a nickel in its life. It lives on subsidies from rich folk. (They prey on wealthy widows). Its writers have day jobs with think tanks. Dougherty is with the American Enterprise Institute.
Rush Limbaugh brought in millions of bucks from advertisers because he had a show that 30 million people tuned into. He saved an entire medium — AM radio — along the way. Millions mourn his passing because he gave them hope in some pretty depressing times.
What has NR ever done for us except attack conservatives? Never Patrick Buchanan! Never Newt Gingrich! Never Donald Trump!
Now Never Rush.
But the trashing of Limbaugh and his fans was a set-up for Dougherty’s pitch for National Review’s podcasts.
He ended his column, “If anything, considering the place of Rush Limbaugh in his nation’s political life is to realize that conservatism has been late to develop a voice that cuts in somewhere between its aloof intellectuals and aggro broadcasters. Conservatism is still searching for a middlebrow voice. Perhaps it is starting to emerge on the podcasts like those hosted by Ricochet and National Review. The effort to conserve, Limbaugh well knew, was an effort to build something new.”
Dougherty is unfit to shine Rush Limbaugh’s shoes.
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