Limbaugh in the Sky with Deceptions

What's the point of arguing with a man like Rush Limbaugh -- a man paid millions to lie?

Al Gore, in his recent speech, castigated Rush Limbaugh for the latter's outrageous remarks about Iraqi prisoner abuse. Gore also denounced Bush and the Republican party for not distancing themselves from the more horrendous statements made by Rush and company.

In my view, it's about time someone said what Gore said. If the GOP does not condemn the atrocious things said by its defenders -- Rush, Savage, Coulter and company -- then those statements should be regarded as the official views of the Republican party. Rush's endorsement of torture, Coulter's call for Clinton's assassination, Savage's racism and homophobia: All these things should be laid on the doorstep of Bush, Ed Gillespie, and the RNC.

Rush, in his defense, maintained that everyone abused at Abu Ghraib was a terrorist and a mass murderer. Actually, they were average Iraqis -- the people we were supposed to liberate. As I've pointed out in this column many times, the Red Cross and numerous press reports indicate that 70-90 percent of the abused prisoners were innocent. If Limbaugh questions that figure, I'd like to know why his expertise on Iraqi prisons outweighs that of the Red Cross.

As the Los Angeles Times and others have reported, military units with poor Arabic language skills would go out in search of various Iraqi insurgent leaders. As a result of miscommunication and frustration, the search teams would often pull in what I call an "AOI" (Any Old Iraqi) unconnected to the insurgency. The innocent always fare worse than the guilty under harsh interrogation, because a man who knows no secret information cannot relieve his stress by talking.

It's worth noting that Rush said nothing about the 37-and-counting prisoners who became corpses under interrogation.

Rush claims that the Geneva convention does not cover terrorists. But it does cover insurgents in an occupied country; the White House calls those insurgents "terrorists" not because the term is accurate but because that is the new label for anything and anyone the neoconservatives do not like. If Richard Perle's dog soils the carpet, poochie is a terrorist. (And as we have seen, many of the abused prisoners were neither terrorists nor insurgents.)

Rush says that Al Gore represents the radical fringe of his party. Gore won the majority of votes to become president in 2000 -- not the record of a fringe candidate. Limbaugh, on the other hand, endorses torture -- which I hope is still considered a fringe stance.

Rush goes on to make many other utterly false statements, waving the bloody shirt of the Clinton era even if doing so requires buckets of fake blood:

* Clinton slashed military spending, according to Rush. In fact, Clinton's $281 million budget did nothing of the kind: He spent more on the military (as measured in constant dollars) than Nixon did during Vietnam.

* Clinton "calls for civil rights for terrorists," according to Rush, who cannot cite a quote to back this assertion. I doubt that Clinton ever issued such a call, although I certainly would: Rights denied the worst of us will soon be lost to the rest of us. As noted earlier, the term "terrorist" has gained an unnerving elasticity.

* Clinton did nothing to stop Bin Laden, according to Rush. Richard Clarke and others say otherwise. Do a Google newsgroup search for the years 1998-2000, and you'll see that Republicans screamed bloody murder about civil rights violations every time Clinton tried to do something about terror! And never forget: Bush the elder and Ronald Reagan funded Saddam and Osama.

One can go on, but why? One cannot bring the sky-high Limbaugh back to earth.

Good lord, the man even espouses the very fringe-y belief that the United States Army is a hotbed of "cultural Marxism"...! If so, why did the military regale its troops with broadcasts from Rush Limbaugh, but not from Air America?