If you happen to be one of the people who reads this diary (and I don't expect many to), please don't read it as a defense of Rush Limbaugh or an attack on the left.
I'm a proud progressive, liberal, left-winger, and citizen of the world (who happens to live in the U.S.). I truly despise Rush Limbaugh and all the damage that he has done to this world of ours, and I wish his career nothing but bad fortune. He's a bad man and if there is a hell, he is going to it when he dies.
Still, I think we're getting a bit carried away here. Rush Limbaugh's explanation of what he meant by "phony soldiers" is not only plausible, it's probable, and in flaming away on him, we are mostly wasting our time.
Media Matters has a transcript of Limbaugh's comment as well as a link to the audio. It also caught Limbaugh falsifying his own transcript. So I won't be relying on Limbaugh's transcript. Instead, I'll rely on Media Matters.
LIMBAUGH: Another Mike, this one in Olympia, Washington. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER 2: Hi Rush, thanks for taking my call.
LIMBAUGH: You bet.
CALLER 2: I have a retort to Mike in Chicago, because I am a serving American military, in the Army. I've been serving for 14 years, very proudly.
LIMBAUGH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER 2: And, you know, I'm one of the few that joined the Army to serve my country, I'm proud to say, not for the money or anything like that. What I would like to retort to is that, if we pull -- what these people don't understand is if we pull out of Iraq right now, which is about impossible because of all the stuff that's over there, it'd take us at least a year to pull everything back out of Iraq, then Iraq itself would collapse, and we'd have to go right back over there within a year or so. And --
LIMBAUGH: There's a lot more than that that they don't understand. They can't even -- if -- the next guy that calls here, I'm gonna ask him: Why should we pull -- what is the imperative for pulling out? What's in it for the United States to pull out? They can't -- I don't think they have an answer for that other than, "Well, we just gotta bring the troops home."
CALLER 2: Yeah, and, you know what --
LIMBAUGH: "Save the -- keep the troops safe" or whatever. I -- it's not possible, intellectually, to follow these people.
CALLER 2: No, it's not, and what's really funny is, they never talk to real soldiers. They like to pull these soldiers that come up out of the blue and talk to the media.
LIMBAUGH: The phony soldiers.
CALLER 2: The phony soldiers. If you talk to a real soldier, they are proud to serve. They want to be over in Iraq. They understand their sacrifice, and they're willing to sacrifice for their country.
LIMBAUGH: They joined to be in Iraq. They joined --
CALLER 2: A lot of them -- the new kids, yeah.
LIMBAUGH: Well, you know where you're going these days, the last four years, if you signed up. The odds are you're going there or Afghanistan or somewhere.
CALLER 2: Exactly, sir. And -- and my other comment was -- and the reason I was calling for -- was to report to Jill about the fact that we didn't, didn't find any weapons of mass destruction. Actually, we have found weapons of mass destruction in chemical agents that [inaudible] been using against us for awhile now.
I've done two tours in Iraq. I just got back in June and there were many instances of -- since [inaudible] not know what they're using in their IEDs [improvised explosive devices]. They're using mustard artillery rounds. The vx-artillery rounds in their IEDs.
Because they didn't know what they were using, they didn't do it right, and so it just kind of -- it, it didn't really hurt anybody but there are -- those munitions are over there, it's just -- it's a huge desert. If they've buried it somewhere, we're never gonna find it.
LIMBAUGH: Well, you know, that's a moot point for me right now --
MIKE: Rush --
LIMBAUGH: -- the weapons of mass destruction. We gotta get beyond that. We're, we're there. What -- who cares if, if -- we all know they were there and, and Mahmoud [Ahmadinejad, Iranian president] even admitted it in one of his speeches here about -- talkin' about Saddam using the poison mustard gas or whatever it is on his own people -- but that, that's moot, right? What, what's more important is all this is taking place now in the midst of the surge working.
And all of these anti-war Democrats are getting even more hell-bent on pulling out of there, which means that success on the part of you and, and your colleagues over there is, is a great threat to them. It's just, it's frustrating and maddening, and it is why they must be kept in the minority.
Look, I want to thank you, Mike, for calling. I appreciate it very much. I gotta -- let me see -- got something -- here is a "Morning Update" that we did recently talking about fake soldiers. This is a story of who the left props up as heroes. And they have their celebrities.
One of them was Jesse MacBeth. Now, he was a "corporal," I say in quotes - 23 years old.
Now, I submit if you read that, Limbaugh's subsequent explanation of his comment that he was referring to Jesse MacBeth is not just plausible, but probable. The caller -- Mike -- was from Olympia, Washington, and MacBeth is from Tacoma, Washington, which is about 40 minutes away (if not less, depending on traffic). Given Limbaugh's link to MacBeth as well as the caller's proximity to Fort Lewis (where I believe MacBeth claimed to be a soldier) and Tacoma (MacBeth's hometown), I tend to believe his story.
Of course, given the wonders of the English language, we'll never know for sure, but do we really want to spend some much time flagellating about some punk named Rush Limbaugh when there are so many more important issues to be discussed?
Personally, I find Limbaugh's statements defending himself far more offensive:
I stand up for the troops. The Democrat Party has been trying to demoralize them. The Democrat Party has been trying to lose the Iraq war, the war on terror. They own defeat. They are invested in it. They have failed to hang defeat around the neck of this president and the presidency they have been trying to destroy.
Read that again. In defending himself from the phony charges, Limbaugh accuses Democrats of treason. That is far more offensive than his original statement, which probably was relatively innocuous (in the case of Limbaugh, relatively innocuous means only very offensive).
This all reminds me of the end of the 2006 campaign when John Kerry supposedly called the troops uneducated. Clearly, he was talking about George W. Bush. Everybody who understands English knows that. Yet his words were distorted into something else.
(Lot of good that did the GOP, eh?)
So can we pull off the same thing against Rush Limbaugh? Maybe, but it's hard -- because we've got the whole establishment against us. Even if we can, do we really want to spend so much energy on something where we are probably wrong?
I mean, in general, it's clear as day that Rush Limbaugh is a chicken hawk who puts his own narrow interests far above America's; he's not patriot. He's the worst kind of person. Does this single comment best exemplify that? Or even do a good job? No.
The fact is that Rush Limbaugh is essentially irrelevant in America, outside of a narrow band of committed ostriches.
Is there any tactical value to putting him on the defensive? Yes. But does this story-line put him on the defensive? Not so much. Why? Because it's not so true.
I've got no doubt that my perspective on this will not be terribly popular, and I hope it is not misconstrued.
To get a better understanding of why I am saying what I am saying, please let me recommend reading one of my favorite essays, Politics and the English Language, written by George Orwell in 1946. (It's acronym and publication date is the basis of my username, Patel1946, in case you're curious about such things.)
It's closing paragraph is one of my favorite passages (emphasis added):
I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse -- into the dustbin, where it belongs.
I suggest reading Orwell's essay, and then thinking about our attacks on Rush Limbaugh.
What I hope occurs to you is that Limbaugh saying something like "phony soldiers" is not what is so offensive about Limbaugh.
What's offensive about Limbaugh is everything he does or says. As Orwell suggested, what Limbaugh does with language is "designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
Focusing in on just one statement -- especially one that really isn't a good example of Limbaugh's extremism -- actually detracts from the overall truth about Limbaugh's evil.
And make no mistake, Rush Limbaugh is one of the most evil men in the entire world.
Our goal in life though is not to crush Limbaugh, but rather to lift humanity and build a better planet, and our focus on the "phony soldier" comment is a distraction from that mission.
Peace,
Patel1946
Update: Rush Limbaugh decided to expand his roster of phony soldiers to include Jack Murtha. Frankly, I'm bewildered by Limbaugh's bizarre logical leap. I'm not going to rewrite this diary, but his statement below does temper my concern just a bit.
You shouldn't hold your breath because there's no standard to hold me to, in the sense that you're talking about. I never said what you think I said, Congressman Pallone, congresswoman Schakowsky, Senator Kerry, or any of the rest of you in the Drive-By Media. I was talking about a genuine phony soldier -- and, by the way, Jesse MacBeth is not the only one. How about this guy Scott Thomas who was writing fraudulent, phony things in the New Republic about atrocities he saw that never happened? How about Jack Murtha blanketly accepting the notion that Marines in Haditha engaged in wanton murder of innocent children and civilians?