That Rush Limbaugh was willing to give a now-rare interview at all seems a signal of just how much trouble he thinks he's in; he tends to do these little promotional bouts after every period of bad (for him) news or a particularly egregious screw-up on his part, only to drop them again soon afterwards. Unsurprisingly, he still thinks of himself as a big a deal as ever—
it's the party that got smaller.
"I always thought that as Republicans we opposed Democrats. We wanted to beat them. I don't see that. I don't see any pushback against anything Obama wants to do," Limbaugh told Van Susteren. "The pushback's against the Tea Party. The pushback is against conservatives. It's a stunning thing. The Republican Party's decided that capitulation with the Democrats seems to be the ongoing strategy."
"No, let's go ahead and let ObamaCare be fully implemented and it will implode on itself and people will see how bad it is," he said, mimicking the Republican leadership. "Well, that's not a strategy; that's capitulation. That's not even pushing back against it.... They're capitulating with what the Democrats want. And not just on this, but on immigration, amnesty, whatever you want to call it."
If what we've been going through these last years counts as "capitulation," you can only imagine what Rush Limbaugh would suggest the party should be doing.
Limbaugh's position as radio kingpin has been getting more sketchy by the week; latest reports suggest he may be losing another few dozen stations after this year's contracts expire. His reaction has been the usual one for right-wing fading stars (Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, etc); amp up the rhetoric. Shout louder. Ratchet up the race-baiting and the conspiracy theories.
There's been no point during the last decade when the Rush Limbaugh didn't have the Republican Party in his pocket. National politicians that criticized him would find themselves forced to apologize, and God help you if you didn't. Limbaugh himself seems to sense that those days are ending. At some point, some Republican with a grudge against him will stick the knife in, and it's not clear Limbaugh has enough clout left to make them pay for it.
None of this is to say that the Republican Party is in any danger of becoming less insane, mind you. But when even the Rush Limbaughs and Karl Roves find themselves on the potentially losing side of party squabbles, it's an indication of just how bad those internal wars have gotten.