Judgment of Rush

I don't make a habit of listening to our sky-high Chief Bloviator of the Airwaves. But I caught a whiff of Rush in the wake of the prisoner abuse scandal. He assured listeners that the problem was "not widespread," and that there were fewer abusive guards in Iraq than there are "plagiarists" and liars in the mainstream U.S. media.

Yow! Where to start? I suppose we should begin by noting that our tax dollars pay for the military, not for the media. The recent scandals involving the New York Times and USA Today (the two publications mentioned by Limbaugh) did not involve "plagiarism" -- to the best of my recollection, the only major plagiarism scandal of recent years involved historian Steven Ambrose, who is not a journalist. It is true that two reporters at the NYT and USA Today were guilty of fabrication. It is also beyond question that the scandal in Iraq involves more than two guards. So Rush's numbers seem just a tad off.

On the other hand, maybe Rush has a point, if you broaden the terms of the debate a bit. Let's include Fox News, Newsmax, the Moonie Times, the New York Post, Regnery publishing, and the Radio Right (including Rush himself). After a survey of this gruesome field, I will agree that the liars skulking within the American media probably do outnumber the torturers in Iraq's prisons.

Among those liars is, of course, the Painkiller Kid himself. Rush said over and over that the problem in Iraq is "not widespread." That same day, a Los Angeles Times front page article on the results of Major General Taguba's investigations appeared under a headline affirming that the problem was "systemic."

Maybe Rush can find an important distinction between the words "widespread" and "systemic." To my way of thinking, any such attempt at parsing would be like finding the difference between "naked" and "nude."

Whenever I heard the Bloviator broadcast this sort of horse manure in days past, I would wonder aloud: "Is he on something?" Now I ask "Is he still on something?"