Let us now take a moment to praise this man's genius.
We all know what a troll is, although on Daily Kos, the definition is often muddled. A troll is not simply someone who disagrees with you, nor is it simply an obnoxious and incendiary individual.
No, trolling is a much more subtle art than that. A good troll calculates his or her words carefully, with intricate foreknowledge of the beliefs and prejudices of the community being trolled, in order to get the maximum response which, ideally, will be destructive (or at least distracting) to the community.
By doing all of these things so adroitly, and by getting the exact response as planned, Rahm Emanuel has executed the most successful In Real Life trolling in history against the Republican Party.
There is a subtlety in the core of Emanuel's statement, which (surprise!) also became a soundbite AND a headline in various places around the media-
He [Rush] is the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party.
Those words are loaded, folks. That one sentence takes a chisel to all of the fault lines currently cracking up the GOP and contributed invaluably to their electoral impotence.
The obvious effect is creating a perception in the mind of regular Americans that Rush really is the spokesperson for the GOP, which is destructive enough. But there's another dimension, far more insidious and far more destructive, which has not been examined in detail.
To a Conservative intellectual like Ross Douthat, Rahm's statement was a taunt. Basically, he said "Your party is run by idiots, and there is no room for an egghead like you."
Conservative intellectuals are already embarrassed by Limbaugh and his acolytes, just like they were (rightly) embarrassed by Sarah Palin and Joe The Plumber. Rahm's statement, and Michael Steele's acquiescence to its essential truth, is like rubbing a salted lemon all over the road rash of the '08 election.
When those intellectuals (or any moderate Gooper) criticize the idiocy endemic in their own party, they are further marginalized. And it just so happens that those intellectuals are the only people who offer a real chance to the GOP of renewal.
So Rahm successfully pitted the boobs against the people with ideas, and today, the boobs won, big time. But will the intellectuals blame Rahm for stoking up drama in the GOP? Of course not. They'll just pout that they don't have any clout in the modern GOP and continue to criticize people like Limbaugh, who will in turn disallow them access to the "movement".
Brilliant. Simply brilliant.
UPDATE
From commentor Remembering Jello-
An opposition party can be an invaluable check on the excesses of any philosophy. As a nation, we've lost sight of that- Honest men can honestly disagree, and negotiate a common path more prudent than either would have chosen alone.
But as a party, the R's stopped listening to their academics and started listening to whoever was saying what they wanted to hear- they bankrupted themselves politically and ideologically in order to feed the monsters they created.
Without strong and thoughtful dissent from the right, so will we.
That's an important point. Just because Rahm is right doesn't mean we should be happy about it. I would actually like there to be a real opposition party, instead of a bunch of idiots being led around by a drug-addled lunatic. But, there we are.