Posted on 05/08/2004 9:01:04 PM PDT by new cruelty
Rush Limbaugh is a slow learner.
That might explain why he looked at the sadistic photos from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and likened them to some college fraternity high jinks.
Boolah, mullah! Boolah, mullah!
Most reasonable people expressed disgust by the sight of the bound, nude, hooded men in American custody being forced to degrade themselves sexually.
And Limbaugh surely would have, too, if it had been under the previous administration.
But Limbaugh's a referee without a whistle these days. So here's how he excused the inexcusable:
"This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation, and we're going to ruin people's lives over it, and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time," he said on his radio show.
Limbaugh added: "I'm talking about people having a good time. These people, you ever heard of emotional release? You heard of need to blow some steam off?"
I knew he was an apologist. But I just figured that in light of his newfound expertise in the realm of investigatory zeal run amok -- something he claims to have learned the hard way in Palm Beach County -- he might have temporarily burst through the wall of his professional limitations.
But, like I said, Limbaugh is apparently a slow learner.
And yet, there's hope.
There used to be a time when he thought that the problem with drugs was that we weren't locking up the people who got caught. This was during the days when he thought the American Civil Liberties Union was a flaky impediment to justice and criminal defense lawyers were an evil bunch of liberal simps who were out to subvert the truth by freeing the guilty on procedural maneuvers.
He has been educated through experience in that regard.
Caught in cross hairs of justice
Ever since the Palm Beach County State Attorney's Office declined to respectfully turn a blind eye to Limbaugh's years of prescription drug abuse, he has become a champion of the drug addict caught in the cross hairs of justice. He talks of the pain of addiction, the need for treatment and the unfairness of prosecutors pursuing people with a personal problem.
If you go to Limbaugh's Web site these days, it's full of tales of horrific miscarriages of justice and calls to end investigatory techniques that we, as Americans, shouldn't stand for.
There are warnings about the "threat to the rule of law." Harassment we can't condone. And a horrible "fishing expedition" for information that should chill us to the core.
No, none of that is about the sadistic abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison.
It's all about Palm Beach County State Attorney Barry Krischer's having the nerve to document Limbaugh's drug abuse through the use of his medical records.
Oh, the horror!
From Limbaugh's bellowing, you'd think Krischer was breaking chemical lights and pouring the scorching phosphoric liquid over the naked talk-show host's... oh, never mind.
Besides, that's just "people having a good time."
All those naked Iraqis must be guilty of something, right? There can't be any innocent civilians rounded up by overzealous authorities. That never happens.
And as for the guilty -- well, the rights of people behind bars is just a left-wing abstraction.
For now. The slow learner better hope this isn't the next awakening in his education.
No, but he tries to give the impression of being more intellectual than he is.
Sometimes he can be downright juvenile.
For instance, on his TV show one time Patsy's restaurant sent over a very large platter of calamari.
Rush ended up throwing handfulls of it at the camera and audience.
That was the kind of stuff that kids in junior high school do, and it was embarassing to watch.
The actually quote is: "I am that I am." -- The Burning Bush To Moses.
Btw, how do we know "who" or "what" you are? Your Home Page is a bit...ambiguous.
That pretty much sums him up as far as I'm concerned too.
Though once in a great while he does say something witty--it's just not worth listening to the other endless hours of his droning on and on and on.
Thank you for sharing this with us all. We do appreciate the crumbs of wisdom that fall from the table of the intelligentsia. I'll scuttle on back below stairs.
But that does not mean that what our MPs did is the equivalent of a Yale frat stunt. Not by a long shot. Rush simply made a bad rationalization against the Blame America First crowd's overplaying of this situation.
My corpus of 20,000 posts on this very site over what, six years, might be a start. I have opined on about everything imaginable, except that boat person son who was sent back to Cuba affair. I am a virgin on that one.
"Har har", as Nelson Muntz would say. = )
I do like Rush much of the time, but I try not to be a damned fool about it.
I started to get annoyed and then furious with Rush when he was hooked on those pills, though I didn't know what the cause of his apostasy was at the time.
I just knew that I didn't like him as well as formerly.
Now that I know what the problem was I tend to let bygones be bygones.
But I wish he would get a backbone about some of those hot-button issues he tends to avoid.
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