Who Knew? Atlantic editor Michael Kinsley listens “to a lot of talk radio,” where, he says, “you can often hear an idea or talking point spreading out among conservatives like a meme, or a weed…”

Recently, says Kinsley, “the theme was that anyone who criticizes Arizona’s new get-tough-on-illegal-immigration law is a hypocrite, because Mexico’s immigration laws are even tougher.” Kinsley, who lives in Seattle, says he “heard it on Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Medved and a local guy named David Boze” and decided “it is an absurd point.”

Kinsley believes most Mexicans “would probably have no trouble agreeing with Rush and Sean and Glenn that Mexico is a dreadful place with a corrupt government that has terrible, onerous laws on many subjects.”

Obviously Kinsley doesn’t agree with the conservative shock jocks on this one — but I doubt many Mexicans agree with him either!

Zev Chafets, author of the forthcoming “Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One,” wrote a recent OpEd for the New York Times wherein he posited that, “Republican success in 2010 can be boiled down to two words: Rush Limbaugh.”

There’s a few large assumptions buried in that sentence, of course, starting with the idea that there has been — or will be — much “Republican success” this year. But Chafets IS correct in noting — as I have for some time — that El Rushbo is “the brains and the spirit” behind any conceivable GOP resurgence, as well as his assertion that, Limbaugh has consistently “mocked the notion that he was the titular leader of the Republicans even as he was becoming the party’s top strategist and de facto boss.”

His strategy was simple — but effective. “With Democrats controlling Congress, Mr. Limbaugh saw that there was no way to stop the president’s agenda… Instead he decreed that the Republicans must become the party of no, and force Democratic candidates “especially centrists “to go into 2010 with sole responsibility for the Obama program and the state of the economy. And that is what has happened.”

What will happen next? As Chafets notes, “Rush Limbaugh came along after the age of Ronald Reagan. He has never really had a Republican presidential candidate to his ideological satisfaction. But if the party sweeps this November under the banner of Real Conservatism, Mr. Obama will find himself facing two years of ‘no” in Washington and, very likely, a Limbaugh-approved opponent in 2012.”