Rush Limbaugh gave what he called his first national address to the CPAC conference, and a funny thing happened, on three separate occasions, he felt the need to proclaim that he loves America, and doesn’t want to see it fail, so it appears that even the mighty Rush is afraid of Obama’s popularity.

Limbaugh said, “We love the people of this country. And we want this to be the greatest country it can be, but we do understand, as people created and endowed by our creator, we’re all individuals. We resist the effort to group us. We resist the effort to make us feel that we’re all the same, that we’re no different than anybody else. We’re all different. There are no two things or people in this world who are created in a way that they end up with equal outcomes. That’s up to them. They are created equal, given the chance.”

Later on Rush backtracked even more and said that he wants Obama and the Democrats to fail, but the nation to succeed, “For those of you just tuning in on the Fox News Channel or C-SPAN, I’m Rush Limbaugh and I want everyone in this room and every one of you around the country to succeed. I want anyone who believes in life, liberty, pursuit of happiness to succeed. And I want any force, any person, any element of an overarching big government that would stop your success, I want that organization, that element or that person to fail. I want you to succeed.” However, if Obama fails, doesn’t the nation also fail?

The conservative yakker expanded on wanting Obama to fail, “This notion that I want the President to fail, folks, this shows you a sign of the problem we’ve got. That’s nothing more than common sense and to not be able to say it, why in the world do I want what we just described, rampant government growth indebtedness, wealth that’s not even being created yet that is being spent, what is in this? What possibly is in this that anybody of us want to succeed? Did the Democrats want the war on Iraq to fail!” This is the difference between Democrats and Republicans. Democrats never wanted the pointless war in Iraq to begin with, but they never hoped for more soldiers to die, however, seem to want the Republicans want the economy to collapse.

The fact that Limbaugh felt compelled to defend his patriotism, and tried to make rooting for economic failure an act of patriotism shows that even Rush Limbaugh fears Barack Obama. Limbaugh did a firm backtrack from his statements on his radio show. Limbaugh will continue to bluster and live in his fantasy world everyday on the radio, but the fact that explained his patriotism on national television is rather stunning. Rush like all the other conservative radio hosts talks big, until it might hurt business. The rest of Limbaugh’s address was the usual mumbo jumbo. Democrats want to grow the government, liberals hate America, and Obama offers no hope, blah, blah, blah.

All of this stuff plays well to a conservative audience, but it sounds delusional after a week where Obama gave a well received speech that boosted his approval rating to well over twice that of the Republicans. Rush Limbaugh is a fraud, who when push comes to shove will never take a real stand, but will always back away, while telling his audience what they want to hear out of the other side of his mouth.

The Full Text of Rush Limbaugh’s CPAC Speech