2 Year
Anniversary Spectacular – Rush Limbaugh
Yep, this website was
launched two years ago today, and in response we are having a two year
anniversary spectacular. I originally suggested a five year anniversary special,
but there’s some legal reason why you are only to have as many year anniversary
as you have actually been around. So it’s a two year anniversary.
And so, borrowing from our friends on TV, we are having a clip show. Yep, get
out the popcorn, lay back, and get ready to enjoy some of my favorite posts for
the last couple of years. To start things off on a light note I thought we’d
cover my top five posts dealing with that Commentator of Commentators Rush
Limbaugh!
First of all the runner-ups, those columns that were good, but they just
weren’t quite good enough. These include the time that Rush talked about what
American diplomacy should be and his ideas contrasted sharply with our current
President’s (February
15, 2003). There was that really weird exchange with a caller, leading into
the idea that you can’t express a negative idea in the War, or an Arab
Newspaper might pick it up and our soldiers might read it (May
1, 2004). There was that laugh inducing moment when Rush Limbaugh claimed
to be the best friend the working poor had ever had (June
10, 2003). And of course there was one of those times El Rushbo showed his mean side, suggesting that American
Blacks have chosen to live on the plantation by remaining Democrats (July
29, 2003).
Well if those are the runner ups, can you imagine how wonderful our five
finalists are? Well you’ll have to imagine, because we’ve decided to keep that
info to ourselves! No I’m just kidding.
5. May
5, 2004. Rush Limbaugh suggested that our fears that the Abu Ghraib scandal would inflame more hatred for us in the middle East were unfounded. Apparently the Terrorists
already hate us as hard as they can, so this won’t make them hate us any more.
This was an easy enough argument to respond to, and I
got to make Venn Diagrams. I enjoy commentating but I don’t often get to draw
Venn Diagrams.
Your Weekly Rush; why they hate us
Listening to Rush as I
was driving around at lunch and he was talking about one of his favorite
subjects; there's no reason to even be interested in why people in the Middle
East don't like us. Specifically, he's saying that one of the reasons everybody
is so upset with the pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib
prison is that there is a concern that it will inflame (and here is where it
seems a little mixed up) terrorists to hate us more. According to Rush
Limbaugh, the Terrorists hate for us is not going away, and we should stop
thinking that it will. Even if we abandoned all of our western ways (like
Britney Spears) and adopted Islam, they would still hate us.
Unfortunately, as I'm sure you noted, Rush's argument goes
off its rails pretty early. Because Rush confuses Iraqis with Terrorists. If we
were to do a Venn Diagram of the Iraqi people
according to Rush's theory it would look something like that.
You see there's not much
connection between the two. Terrorists are terrorists. Good Iraqis are Good
Iraqis. If you accept this postulate, well, Rush is right. There is no point in
doing anything to make the Terrorists like us, and Good Iraqis are going to
largely like us no matter what we do.
Unfortunately for Rush, most people assume (in my opinion,
correctly) that an actual diagram might look something like this.
Now we might quibble about
the relative size of the circles. We don't know, for example, how much of the
Iraqi resistance is led by or aided by outside intervention. Some say very
little, and other say all of it. I personally think
it's a factor, but not a large factor.
At any rate what this Venn Diagram
(and how often do you see Venn Diagrams on weblogs.
I'm really blazing new territory today!) shows us is
that there is a portion of the Iraqi people that is fighting United States
Forces. But, unlike in the earlier diagram, there's nothing stopping people
from moving in and out of that group. Some Iraqis seeing the events at Abu Ghraib prison or Fallujah might
decide that it is time to take up arms against our Troops. Other Iraqis, seeing
some of the good things our soldiers are doing, might decide that they should
give us time to get out.
The implications are clear. Unfortunately, it seems that
some member of our forces in
4. June
19, 2004. Rush Limbaugh explains that Fahrenheit 9/11 isn’t a movie. Nope.
Not a movie.
Your Weekly Rush; Fahrenheit 911
Rush Limbaugh echoes
the PABAAH line about Fahrenheit 911. You should call your local
theater and ask them not to show it. Or to put it in his own words . . .
"So what you should do, and it would probably be
more effective, is to get as many people as you can to bombard a local theater
in Omaha, if there is one that's going to screen the movie and say you don't
think that this is right because this movie is not a movie. It's not a
documentary. It's being misrepresented as to what it is. It's just nothing but
propaganda and that you think a responsible theater owner wouldn't lend his screen
to this purpose."
I am a bit stunned to find out Fahrenheit 911 isn't a
movie. I guess it must be a Slide Show? An Interpretive Dance Performance? A
Staged Reading of Haikus? I mean if it's not a movie, I guess Rush has a point.
You show movies in a movie theater, so if Fahrenheit 911 isn't a movie, that
wouldn't be the appropriate venue for it.
Oh, wait, apparently it is a movie. It's on film and
everything.
As for it being propaganda, well Rush thinks that any
presentation of the liberal position is propaganda (as opposed to what he
does). Contrast his opinion on whether or not people should be able to go to
the movie theater and see Mr. Moore’s movie vs. his opinion on whether or not
his extremely conservative radio show should be balanced by something liberal
on Armed Services Radio.
He also follows another aspect of the PABAAH line; we're
guaranteed to fail, so it doesn't matter if we try. ". . . the odds are
that we're not going to stop it. Nobody is going to able to stop it from being
seen . . ."
So it's ok to try to censor a movie, so long as it doesn't seem likely that you
will actually succeed. Not sure about the logic there, but what do I know? I'm
just another liberal propogandist.
3. June
23, 2003. You’d think claiming Fahrenheit 9/11 wasn’t a movie would be hard
to top, but on this day Rush claimed that the existence of affirmative action
laws proved that we were not a racist society and so such laws were clearly not
necessary. It’s always a crowd pleaser to take on affirmative action, but your
arguments should at least pretend to make sense.
Your Weekly Rush
OK, listening to Rush today as I'm driving back from lunch
(where I had home-made potato Salad), and he put forward this argument.
If we were a racist society we would not seek to install
programs such as the
Did you follow that?
Dr. Limbaugh then went on to suggest that the existence of
medicine and doctors proved that we knew how to make people healthy, and since
we have the ability to make people healthy, doctors and medicine are really
unnecessary.
Rush then took a call from John, a 35 year old pilot, who
happened to be in the air at that time. He commented that since he clearly had
the ability to fly his wings were at this point probably unnecessary. After all
wings allow a plane to fly, but he already was flying. So he pressed a button
that unhooked his wings from his plane. Rush then went to commercial.
There was one telling Freudian slip on Rush's
discussion of the Supreme Court Decision yesterday. Rush
stated, "This conservative Republican administration didn't make a
strong constitutional argument for abolishing this case of clear-cut
discrimination - of transferring bigotry from one group [i.e.
blacks] to another[i.e. whites], even though the individuals who
suffer may have had nothing to do with past discrimination. "
You see Rush is comfortable with bigotry against Blacks,
but doesn't want to see poor White kids afflicted by it. I'll be charitable and
assume that Rush didn't mean it, and would oppose bigotry anywhere it raised
its head, but it is still telling.
Just so you know the bits about the doctors and the pilot
were made up. But the quote on racism is real.
2. January
28, 2004. Rush makes one of the harshest attacks on liberals I remember him
making. A snippet. “You people [liberals] are reprehensible. You are absolutely
reprehensible. You are the lowest piece of (blank) I’ve ever run to in this
planet. I can’t believe you people.” Rush claims to be a harmless little
goofball, but sometimes I wonder.
Your Weekly Rush; why he's so angry
Well here's Rush
yesterday on the radio.
"You people have absolutely zero intellectual
credibility or character to sit here, call this program and try to make some
issue out of the Bush administration deciding to wait one month to start
explaining why we needed to go to war in
I don't need to explain that by "You People" Rush
means Liberal Democrats.
So why is Rush so mad? There are a couple of theories out
there, most of them involving him being under or over medicated. But I don't
buy that, personally. So what could it really be?
I think it is that Rush's house of cards is starting to
fall apart. Look at what prompted this tirade. Some questions on how President
Bush misled us into war. At this point only the most "faithful" still
believe that the Administration didn't mislead the American people a bit. Most
of the honest ones will admit that, but claim that the ends justify the means.
But whether or not that remains the opinion of the American people remains to
be seen. The fact is that things aren't going all that wonderfully in
Liberals are shining a light on the decisions that led us
into this war and that have failed to plan sufficiently for the peace. This
would be ok if President Bush were an ordinary president like a Clinton or a
George H. W. Bush. But a great deal of the Current President Bush's power comes
from his ability to project power and legitimacy. If Democrats keep nibbling at
his credibility, well, his legitimacy will slowly drain away as well.
Frankly if I had pinned the hopes of my movement on
President George W. Bush I'd be angry too. And I'd look around for someone to
take my anger out at.
Still he does take it a bit far. Remember this bit? "You
people all need to be sequestered somewhere for a couple of months to get your
minds right because you people can't even be honest with yourselves." Hmmmm. I think the Chinese Commies had something like this.
They called it an "Education camp." Not sure if that fits in well
with American traditions and values, but I guess Rush would know better than I
do.
1. July
21, 2004. Eight Little Words. “My Friends, do you ever marvel . . . at me?”
Yes, Rush. Sometimes we do. But probably not in the sense that you mean it.
I'm Dreaming of a Genie In a Magic Bikini - An Absurdist Post
"My Friends, do you
ever marvel . . . at me?" - Rush Limbaugh, just before 2:00 p.m., July 21,
2004.
"I keep saying, greatness does not need to be
explained. Greatness does not need to be defined and John Kerry continues to
have to explain himself and to define himself because who he is doesn't stand
out, and who he is doesn't strike anybody as great." - Rush Limbaugh on or
around Monday, April 26.
I just can't get my head around those two statements.
They seem so . . . contridictory.
"My Friends, do you ever marvel . . . at me?" -
Rush Limbaugh, just before 2:00 p.m., July 21, 2004.
I guess honesty forces me to admit that at times I do
marvel at Mr. Limbaugh. But not for the reasons he's probably thinking
of.
"My Friends, do you ever marvel . . . at me?" -
Rush Limbaugh, just before 2:00 p.m., July 21, 2004.
Oh and those three ellipses are not indicating any missing
lines; just to show the pause.