Rush Limbaugh Sides with Rand Paul over McCain and Graham

I don't usually pay attention to Rush Limbaugh but this rant seems to have been pretty good.  Conor Friedersdorf from the Atlantic has certainly taken notice.  Here are some key excerpts from Rush:

{Rand Paul}'s now a national figure. He wasn't wild-eyed and screaming and pounding. He was very rational and very reasonable. He was asking a very simple, easily explained and understood question... So it was easily understood. It was a very simple question he was posing, and all this was going on while our guys are out dining with Obama, dining with the architect of this current nationwide mess. Rand Paul was standing up opposing this while these guys were out yukking it up with the architect of it all. You know it was a great example of the ruling class and the country class, and the ruling class not liking what this country class senator was doing. It's no more complicated than that, but a lot of people are ticked off about this, too.

...

But he has the nation captivated. It's caused a real reversal. Not a reversal, but the whole structure of things has now been upset, and it's got a lot of people concerned, and it has legs. It does have legs. So I think it's fascinating to behold, and once again it illustrates that these guys going to dinner with Obama, they were not challenging him.

They were not. People think this country is falling apart. People think that this country's on its last legs as they know it, as it was founded. People in this country are really scared. There is a despondency among the population, a majority of the population. This isn't just politics-as-usual. As far as the population the country's concerned, the opposition party still doesn't get it to the point that they're not even the opposition party! Well, Rand Paul appeared to be the opposition, and he had the guts and the courage to stand up and demand that they explain something to him. And not only is he alive to tell about it, he's not being called names.

He's a hero to people.

And here is some interesting analysis from Conor Friedersdorf:

In the Spring of 2011, I wrote a widely ignored article arguing that the Republican Party's presidential nominee would be hard pressed to successfully run to President Obama's right on national security, given his aggressive approach to counterterrorism and the country's war weariness, but that pushing back against Obama's War on Terror excesses would be good politics and policy: "Imagine a nominee who a) issued a biting, accurate take-down of security theater, and inflamed voter passions by becoming a demagogue on naked airport scanners and intrusive pat-downs; b) Insisted that Libya was an imprudent, unaffordable war that had nothing to do with American interests, and was illegally launched; c) Tore into Obama for asserting the power to assassinate American citizens in secret, hammering on the obvious imprudence and frightening potential for abuse; d) pointed out that we'd be a lot safer if we redirected money now spent on nation-building in Afghanistan to almost any halfway effective, achievable counter-terrorism measure); e) picked one or two of the most egregious civil liberties abuses going on and pinned them on Obama."

What I described sure resembles the approach that Rand Paul has taken. Amazingly, several Tea Party aligned senators now seem to be playing along. And most surprising of all? Rush Limbaugh, the demagogue most attuned to the rank-and-file, is now celebrating Senator Paul's approach.