Is Rush Right?

Rush Limbaugh says that every Republican wants the President to fail:

Would this be right, I wonder? I admit, I can see how it might be tempting. I vividly remember 2001. I didn't vote for George Bush; I didn't/don't even think he was really elected. But at that time, I was not deeply hostile to him, and in any event, I very much subscribed to the view that we get only one President at a time, and that we all had a stake in Bush's success.

Flash forward a year or so and of course it wasn't a question of wanting him to fail; Bush had pretty much taken care of that problem himself. But I admit I did feel myself a bit of a chump for ever so much a having entertained any attitude of charity and goodwill, against people with so much contempt against anybody who did not share their own ruffian ways. I suppose we can imagine an Obama regime that is such a farrago of malice and incompetence that we'll start counting the days all over again.

Is that the attitude of Susan Collins? Arlen Specter? Lindsey Graham? Any of those other Republicans that we choose to treart as "statesmen," at least as that term is understood on the Sunday morning talk shows?

My guess: they don't want Obama to fail. They feel more or less as I did in 2001 (and suspect they will not have reason to feel as I did by 2002). My guess is that Limbaugh knows that as well as I do--and in fact, he isn't even presuming to speak for them. What he is doing is to offer an assertion of dominance, an attempt at humiliation: he wants to show, hopes he can show, that people like Collins, Specter and Graham are so afraid of the great gasbag that they won't even be willing to step up for this fundamental act of civi responsibility.

So where are you guys? Will you let yourself be bullied by Limbaugh? Or will you step up and say that no, you for one do not hope that our President will fail? Anyone? Anyone?