I will never listen to Rush
Limbaugh again.
At first glance the reader will assume
that I am a left-wing type, or at the very least a middle-of-the-roader.
Nothing could be further from reality. The left-wingers, with their
religious devotion to abortion, communism, and sodomy are my sworn
enemies. The middle-of-the-roaders are worse, because they believe in
nothing. The fact is that I am an ultra conservative and have been for
most of my life. I voted for Reagan twice, Bush the Elder once and Pat
Buchanan twice. once as a write in)
The reason I will never listen to Rush
Limbaugh again is because he is a fraud and a liar.
Let me expand on this idea a bit.
Included in this are other media "right-wing thinkers" such as Sean
Hannity, G Gordon Liddy, Micahel Reagan, Bill O’Reilly, Glen Beck, and
Michael Savage. They are all liars and frauds.
When I began to grow up, meaning when I
was on my own and began the process of becoming a responsible adult,
(which, by the way coincided with the election of Bill Clinton as
President,) I was hungry to listen to anything that Limbaugh and some of
the others had to say that would guide me towards the truth, because I
knew that Clinton’s election signaled that things in this country were
really in a mess. For over ten years I listened to him and learned a lot.
He was obviously intelligent and funny, and explained a lot of things that
up to that point I didn’t really grasp that well, being young and
untested.
The more I learned, the more I
understood. And as the years went by, I began a slight, repeat, slight
departure from how Rush saw things, most notably in his blind devotion to
anyone who belonged to the Republican Party, despite what their actual
beliefs were. When he began pushing for Dole’s nomination over Buchanan’s
in the ‘96 primary, I knew something was wrong with Rush’s thinking. I
knew what Dole was like. Despite attaching a big "R" behind his name to
denote his party affiliation, he was no conservative. He didn’t think like
one and he rarely voted like one. Yet we, Rush’s devotees, were expected
to "take his word for it" that Bob Dole was the man, and thus throw all
our support behind him. A lot of us did, and, as history has shown, we
lost the presidential race because of it.
There were other instances along the
way. During the debates over WTO and GATT, Limbaugh towed the line for
those who would surrender American sovereignty in favor of an
international body when it came to trade issues. Anyone who protested,
claiming that these groups, and other internationalist groups like them
were a danger to American ideals and American independence were laughed at
and called "kooks." I knew then that if I, an unsophisticated,
semi-educated individual could see that these groups and ideas were wrong
for our nation and that he couldn’t, than there was something wrong with
the whole "conservative talk-show movement."
The final straw has finally come. And
now is where we should expand this list to include the other
"conservatives" listed above. The final straw has come over this issue in
the Middle East.
The reader probably is asking
him/herself "Middle East? He means Iraq, Right?"
Well, partly, yes. Iraq, today. The
rest of the Middle East tomorrow.
After 9/11 happened, I, like many
Americans, "rushed" home to our familiar stomping grounds, i.e.,
conservative talk radio, to find out what they had to say about it, since
we knew for sure that the liberal media wouldn’t give us the truth. And
like many throughout history, we made the mistake of buying into that old
adage that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." Therefore, Rush and the
others would be able to shed some light on the subject.
But they lied. Rather, they told
half-truths. And here is how.
In this country, for the last 50+
years, we have gotten one side of the story as pertains the Middle East
situation, and that is from the pro-Israeli side. After the commencement
of the Cold War, when definite geo-political lines were being drawn, it
was definitely in the interest of the US to maintain a stabile presence in
the area, given our dependence on oil. It seemed the most logical thing to
do to side with the Israelis, given that there were American Jews who
threw their influence into the political arena and the fact that many of
the Jews emigrating to Israel in the early days were coming from "Cold
War" countries within the Soviet Union and therefore could provide the US
with vital intelligence on how things worked behind the "Iron Curtain."
So, despite the best efforts of the Arab countries, such as Egypt, who
wanted a good partnership with the US vs a partnership with communist
atheists in the Soviet Union, the US threw her support behind the Zionist
vision of an Israeli state in Palestine.
After 9/11 happened, Limbaugh and the
others, in the most indignant, surprised, and half-bewildered tone,
explained the whole Anti-American sentiment on behalf of the Arab world
like this, and I am paraphrasing:
"They hate freedom. They hate
prosperity. They hate our success and our wealth. They hate other
religions. They hate women and minorities."
And not a mention of the fact that for
the last 50 years, the Israelis have used American tanks, guns, planes,
and bullets to run over a million people off the land they have occupied
for over a thousand years. Not a mention of the fact that the Israelis
have violated international law time and again in this process (that same
body of international law violated by Iraq for which Bush justifies his
going to war in the region) and not a mention of the fact that the
"freedoms" that these Muslim nations detest in America can be summed up in
a few short descriptions:
Abortion, Sodomy, Pornography, et al.
These are the "freedoms" that the
Muslims hate. They do not tolerate these vices in their societies, and
they don’t want them ever to arrive. So, when the Muslims talk about the
"Great Satan" in the West, this is about which they speak. And given the
fact that Israel has, of late, begun the process of "expansion" into the
lands that she claims are hers, (all the lands between the Nile and
Euphrates rivers, in short, the lands of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq)
it is easy to see that this is not a "war of religion, " as some well
paid-off members of the Christian evangelical community may claim, but
rather a war of culture and survival. When a belligerent nation who claims
to own the land the Arabs are occupying gets cozy with the world’s most
powerful military/economic power who, by the way, desperately needs the
oil within those Arab lands, it is easy to see why some people in the
region get nervous, and it is easy to see how people will be pushed into
committing acts of desperation.
For Limbaugh and the others, their
decision to "hide the ugly truth" from their listeners amounts to lying.
Before a nation goes to war, the people, at least in a free society,
deserve to know what they are getting into and why. And when Limbaugh and
the others treat us like children, shielding the truth from us as if we
were too stupid and incompetent to know the truth and decide for ourselves
how we feel about it, well, then, he is plying the same tactics he accuses
the left-wing media of using, which is, obviously, more than a little
hypocritical.
These guys do manage to slip up a lot
though. When the anti-war crowd claims that all this business is being
done to further the interests of the oil companies and expand Israeli
territory, Limbaugh and his coterie indignantly refuse this. Later, when
they have a caller or guest on who is a fellow-traveler in support of the
war, they talk seriously about how we have to "stand by our only ally in
the Middle East," Israel, at all costs, and as well how important it is to
secure the oil wells in a country that has the 2nd largest reserves in the
world. So which is it fellas?
In the four Gospels, Our Lord warns us
of future apocalyptic times saying "Take heed that no man seduce you. Many
false prophets shall arise, seducing many."
Does this not ring true of today?
Mark Glenn is an American and former high school teacher turned writer / commentator. He contributed above article to Media Monitors Network (MMN).
