Rush Limbaugh, sociopath
It takes a lot for Rush Limbaugh to get noticed these days. Statements so offensive or vile that they would get any other practitioner removed from the airwaves are relatively commonplace for Limbaugh, and to little effect: once fired from a television gig for statements about a black football player, racebaiting rhetoric is a staple of his radio show. But if there was any line left to be crossed for our era's Father Coughlin, this, from Friday,
well and truly erased it.
Apparently sensing an opportunity to tarnish President Obama’s standing with listeners who were unaware of the suffering caused by the African rebels who call themselves the Lord’s Resistance Army, Rush Limbaugh responded to the president’s deployment of 100 military advisers to combat the group in central Africa in a segment of his radio show headlined, “Obama Invades Uganda, Targets Christians.”
Mr. Limbaugh began his discussion of the group — described by my colleagues Thom Shanker and Rick Gladstone as “a notorious renegade group that has terrorized villagers in at least four countries with marauding bands that kill, rape, maim and kidnap with impunity” — by explaining that the “Lord” referred to in their name is not someone named Lord, but “God.” [...]
Overlooking the detailed record of their brutality and bizarre practices, Mr. Limbaugh then added: “They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan. And Obama has sent troops, United States troops, to remove them from the battlefield, which means kill them. So that’s a new war, a hundred troops to wipe out Christians in Sudan, Uganda.”
The transcript makes it clear enough. Limbaugh is committed to the notion of Obama being at war to "wipe out Christians." He is further dedicated towards the notion that whatever Obama is for, he and his listeners must reflexively be against, apparently at any moral cost. But allying himself with an armed group synonymous with vicious, monstrous acts seems a high price for the mere chance to frighten his listeners with tales of a Christian-hating president.
I had hoped, then, that he would back off the statement in short order. After all, as the Times article said:
According to the transcipt on his Web site, near the end of Friday’s radio segment, Mr. Limbaugh said: “Is that right? The Lord’s Resistance Army is being accused of really bad stuff? Child kidnapping, torture, murder, that kind of stuff? Well, we just found out about this today. We’re gonna do, of course, our due diligence research on it. But nevertheless we got a hundred troops being sent over there to fight these guys — and they claim to be Christians.”
As Reuters reports, Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, initially attracted supporters in northern Uganda’s Acholiland in the late 1980s “with a creed based on a mix of mysticism and apocalyptic Christianity. Over the years the L.R.A. become known for chilling violence including what human rights groups say were the abductions of thousands for use as child soldiers or sex slaves, brutal club and machete attacks on victims.”
So due diligence was called for, says Limbaugh. Would that due diligence actually be done, and would it result in an apology or even so much as a clarification by Limbaugh? Apparently not. On Tuesday's show, Limbaugh did deal with the issue, in the form of responding to Sen. Jim Inhofe, who had criticized Limbaugh for his characterizations of the issue. Limbaugh's only response was to tease his staff as to whether or not they would ever have thought they would be entered into the Congressional Record for not having heard of it. He did concede, albeit glancingly, that he was "misinformed", but the clear implication was that he was "misinformed" as to whether 100 troops sent to Uganda constituted a war: he made no apparent mention of being "misinformed" as to whether this cultist-led army of thugs and murderers was perhaps not the side to be supporting, in a choice between them and the much-hated Barack Obama.
Here's the thing: clearly, Limbaugh and his staff had done enough "due diligence" to have heard Inhofe's speech condemning him and outlining what the Lord's Resistance Army actually was. He had that opportunity. There is no way Limbaugh could, at this point, not know the general record of the group he was aligning himself with. Even if the only news he ever concerned himself with was the mention of his own name, like a cat hearing a can opener, that would at least had led him to the Inhofe speech outlining the barbarism of the group. We can be as charitable to Limbaugh as we like, and in the end it comes down to him accusing the president of conspiring to kill Christians without bothering to know the first thing about the situation he is opining on, and following up with no further explanation when it is made crystal-clear to him that he has chosen the side of raping, village-killing, child-burning sex-slave-trafficking murderers.
Now, I want you to reflect on that a bit, on just how dedicated towards misinformed loathing of his opponents Limbaugh must be, and how very dedicated he is towards misleading his listeners into despising Obama—into believing the president to be a Christian-killer, a man intervening some in supposedly legitimate war against the "Muslims in Sudan" in order to target the Christian side of the fight. It requires a staggering commitment.
It requires siding with the group that attacks entire villages, murdering the inhabitants with machetes. It requires siding with the burning of young children, alive. It requires siding with organized rape, and with the capture of women and children for the sex trafficking industry.
It ought to be enough to make any even half-decent human shudder. There is ideological disagreement, and there is political posturing, and there is political hatred between groups, but at the point when you are siding with the terrorists, literally, in order to cast aspersions on your opponent, you have gone off the rails entirely. And Rush has apparently done that, if not intentionally then than certainly intentionally now, since we can presume he is better educated now than before. He accused Obama of using the military to murder Christians in support of Muslims, which in and of itself should be enough to get any loathsome sack of garbage removed from a position of dominance in the public sphere, but go figure, but even presuming he was merely uninformed and dull-witted, before, he is informed now, and he so far has maintained the premise. Sure, perhaps it isn't a war. But that's all he will allow, for his audience. The rest of it stays intact, because Limbaugh cannot see clear to retracting it.
I am not sure what exactly we can even expect, in a case like this. It is mostly unprecedented: this level of shit-laden vitriol usually results in the speaker being shunned from any even remotely serious circles, even in "serious circles" where Nazi comparisons ring out daily, where conspiracy theories are probed as actual news, and where it is commonplace to declare that so-and-so hates America because they have not sided with you. But choosing the literal group of murderers, in your dedication towards your daily smearing of the president: that still, thank God, counts as a very damn rare occurrence. We could marvel at all the stations that still carry Limbaugh, the Limbaugh who chose the murderers over the Democrat because his hatred was just that strong, but would mere advocation for the rights of nice Christian murderers really chafe them any more than all of the nonsense and bile Limbaugh already lets loose on their airwaves? We could ask his party to condemn him, instead of treating him as the goddamn Duke of Conservatism, but they seem incapable of such a thing. There is more of a chance of Inhofe apologizing to Limbaugh for his rather mild remarks than of any group of politicians coming out in force against Limbaugh siding with a murdering, terrorizing army in his conspiracy theory against the president and demanding he retract the asinine statements in question. We live in a time, after all, when even the mere perception of a celebrity uttering a racist thing, or an anti-American-sounding thing, results in an orgasm of public condemnation: where are the other media outlets now? If Imus was a story, why not this? If the freaking Dixie Chicks were a story, why not this? Does this lunatic truly have a free pass for literally everything?
Limbaugh has found, in his radio program, the ultimate outlet for even the most despicable premises. Casual racism, outright lies, the mocking of the poor or the sick—it is all stock in trade for conservatism's most powerful voice. And if he even sides with the sex-trafficking, child-killing machete-wielding murderers, we can wonder all we like at how he gets away with such things, but the real answer is that his listeners allow it, and the politicians that swear loyalty to him allow it, and all those in the movement that claims him as valued speaker, pundit, polemicist and very loud voice allows it, and the media that is so quick to jump on the foibles of a hundred other meaningless celebrity "scandals" allows it, through conspicuous and rigorous omission, and in the end the vast conservative base does not find these statements nearly so deplorable as to require them to sever ties with the sociopath.
Rush Limbaugh is merely a foul, mean, and conscienceless man: those are common enough. But we are worse as a nation for willingly putting up with his bile, and for attaching the label of serious political speech to any damn bit of it. His ability to remain on the stage—no matter how thuggish and vile his performance, the hook never comes to drag him off—degrades every one of us.