3/9/13 -
Rush Limbaugh took a call from a listener Friday that set him
off on a rant against Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham for their
opposition to Sen. Rand Paul's filibuster. The caller demanded that
McCain and Graham make a public apology to Paul on the Senate floor, and
Limbaugh agreed. "This incident, the Rand Paul filibuster," Limbaugh
said, "has turned things upside down in Washington." He tied the older
senators' backlash against the younger Paul to the dinner they had with
President Obama Wednesday night. Limbaugh expressed his outrage over the
fact that McCain and Graham were lobbing insults at Paul while at the
same time sitting down to dine with the object of Paul's scorn. "Who are
they siding with?" he asked.
Echoing Shepard Smith, who set off
McCain by calling him "interventionist" Friday on Fox News, Limbaugh
said, "There is a fear among McCain, Lindsey Graham, and others who
favor an interventionist foreign policy." Specifically, he said, old
guard neo-con Republicans fear that Rand Paul is following in his
father's "isolationist" footsteps. "That's why they're calling Rand Paul
a wacko," Limbaugh said, "because that's what they thought of Ron
Paul."
Limbaugh appears to be using his massive platform to stoke
the latest rift emerging in the Republican Party, between those who
support Rand Paul's broad stand against military intervention and those,
like McCain and Limbaugh, who would rather not disrupt the status quo.