It is Day 4 of the Rush Limbaugh railings against frustrated conservatives who might sit out this election.  And once again, Rush has tried to assign motive and intent to me and people like me (given that it was this article  supporting Instapundit's premortem that helped set off this discussion).

My motive? Apparently it's about power. I want to wreck things for the Republicans so that if the Republicans lose in November I can say "See, look at my POOOWEERR!" If Rush bothered to do his research, he'd know that I am not going to any real effort to try to affect the election. I run sites that get over 3 million visitors per day and have over 6 million registered users and the only site I've even been writing about my frustration with Republicans -- and have been for over a year now -- is on my personal blog site on JoeUser.com which gets a trivial amount of traffic by comparison.  What Rush simply refuses to accept is that a lot of bloggers, like most people, may care about politics but they don't care care. We're not on any sort of Jihad. It's not negative energy from conservatives that are causing problems, it's voter apathy.

Given this week's events, I think that it would be easy to get the non-crackpot vote to feel decidedly anti-Republican given some of the rather nasty insinuations Rush has sent my way. I can see it now:

I wrote a blog agreeing with fellow blogger Glenn Reynolds that if the Republicans lose in November that they deserved it and Rush then spent 3 days ripping me a new one on his show demanding in no uncertain terms that we will vote for whoever has an (R) by their name no matter what.  In fact, he went so far today as to coin a new term for conservatives who dare not provide unconditional support to Republicans -- "Cut and run conservatives". 

I have my own term for people who mindlessly vote for a party: Sheep.

I seem to recall Rush and other Republicans ridiculing African Americans and the Unions for voting for Democrats time after time because the Democrats weren't doing much for them.  I guess it's only idiotic to behave like sheep if it's for a Democrat but if you're a conservative, it's your moral duty.

On today's show Rush referred to this article and in response:

By the way, I've got a new name for you conservatives who aren't going to vote out there: Cut-and-Run Conservatives. The Cut-and-Run Conservatives, one of their central themes is, "It's not going to be so bad if Democrats win. The world's not going to come to an end."

So let's define that: Cut-and-Run Conservatives are conservatives who choose not to vote this election cycle because of their frustration with the Republican candidate.  What if they vote for the Libertarian candidate? Are they still cut-and-run? What about conservatives who do vote for the Republican candidate but also don't think that the world is going to end if the Democrats win?

While we're at it, let's flip it around: A TRUE conservative, according to Rush Limbaugh, is a conservative who blindly votes for THE PARTY and believes that should the Democrats win that the world will end.

Wow.  I mean, wow.  When the Democrats say things like that on DemocraticUnderground about Republicans we call them kooks.