Jun 12, 2008

Why Does Rush Limbaugh Hate Will Bunch… and America?

Yet another example of the massive cognitive dissonance required to be a dittohead, courtesy of AttyTood:

To what do I owe the privilege? The backstory is interesting, but in a nutshell the right-wing blogosphere belatedly (as in nearly two months late) stumbled onto Sen. Barack Obama’s April visit to the Daily News, where I had the chance to ask him how an Obama administration might deal with White House internal discussions of torturing terror suspects, and other potential crimes in the Bush White House.

Here’s a short snippet of what I wrote on April 14:

Tonight I had an opportunity to ask Barack Obama a question that is on the minds of many Americans, yet rarely rises to the surface in the great ruckus of the 2008 presidential race — and that is whether an Obama administration would seek to prosecute officials of a former Bush administration on the revelations that they greenlighted torture, or for other potential crimes that took place in the White House.

Obama said that as president he would indeed ask his new Attorney General and his deputies to “immediately review the information that’s already there” and determine if an inquiry is warranted — but he also tread carefully on the issue, in line with his reputation for seeking to bridge the partisan divide. He worried that such a probe could be spun as “a partisan witch hunt.” However, he said that equation changes if there was willful criminality, because “nobody is above the law.”

[..]From there, the far-right blogosphere was off and running, working its way down the food chain until it burrowed into the muck of Limbaughland, who really seemed more worked up about insignificant little me – who became a “Stalinist” once the worked-up El Rushbo reached the end of his monologue — than about the Democrat poised to take over the White House :

After the administration’s left office, to pursue an investigation that might lead to criminal indictments for war crimes and other things. We used to do that to the Nazis. We did do that to the Nazis, the Nuremberg Trials and so forth. This is who today’s modern liberals are. Now, Obama’s got this wacko reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News who’s obviously not a reporter. He is a leftist who happens to have secured a job in journalism, and he’s got an agenda, and the agenda is right out of the cliched story line of the Drive-By Media, that we are a murderous, raping, torturing nation and that Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Powell have to pay. This is all about creating the notion in as many people’s minds that our country is criminal, is in a constant state of decline, and we are not worth our reputation as the world’s greatest superpower.

Limbaugh concluded:

This would be a direct assault on the United States and its government. And you talk about we need to improve our reputation in the world. Look at how they would do it. By finding the US guilty at every opportunity of whatever baseless, phony charges that they would make. This is Stalinist. If you’ve ever wondered what the definition of is Stalinist, this would fit it.

Frankly, I think the political right, all the way up to the White House, doth protest too much on this whole “war crimes” issue; that is, they’re realizing the polls are showing the GOP may be shut out of power, and people desperately want to steer the conversation away from the things that were actually done the last 7 1/2 years, from authorizing torture to widespread spying on Americans. You’re going to see a lot of things in the next few months — some subtle, some blatant — seeking to shift the debate away from the horrors inside the House at 1600.


Tip to Crooks and Liars

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