Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Slender Liar

I have been a political/economic news junkie lately, and so I try to catch Rush at lunch and Glenn Beck at night (when I take my son to the park after work). Incidentally, Glenn Beck has really been awesome lately. I don't know if it's just his niche and he ran with it for ratings, but in any case he has been passionately opposed to the bailout, and has been urging his listeners to "stand up for what you believe--someone has to say 'NO' to this!" Etc.

Anyway, Woody will be glad to know that I caught Rush completely distorting the excerpts he played from Barack Obama's audio book Dreams From My Father. (I know because my wife and listened to it on a road trip several months ago.) Rush was playing the part where Obama talked about hanging out with Nation of Islam guys, and how they hated whites as a race, not just individual white jerks. And Obama said something like, "This conflicted with the subtle morality I learned from my mother, where you gave people the benefit of the doubt until they proved you wrong." And then a sentence later he said, "I found I couldn't shake this framework" or something.

So naturally, Rush told his listeners, "You see folks? Here we have the anointed one, the messiah, Barack Hussein Obama, telling us how his peers hated whites, and that he could not shake their worldview, try as he might. And note the rhetoric here, folks. This is the messiah who is supposed to unite us? Preaching class warfare as virulent as that of Jeremiah Wright?"

It would be difficult to be more intellectually dishonest than Rush was here. How the frick would someone heal racial tensions except through openly discussing what militant black guys say when there are no whites around...and then admitting that it is wrong? (To be clear, Obama was saying he couldn't shake his childhood morality, not the new hatred of whites he was learning as a young man.)

For what it's worth, I think Naomi Wolf hit the nail on the head in her "paranoid" video. Near the end she says something like, "We are in coup time now. People who think we need to vote for Obama, and that Bush would hand over power to him...That's just crazy talk."

Note that McCain didn't stoop to "personal attacks," until this week. It is now clear that he was saving them for the end, or, at the very least, he was trying not to use them but now thinks they are his only shot. If we get a week out and Obama still has a comfortable lead, I just may stock up on canned goods. Who knows what the heck "crisis" will then emerge.

Comments

  1. Bob, while I`m disturbed at what is going on, it seems to me the fact that McCain is losing in the face of the financial collapse is a sign that there is no "coup" underway (although plenty of creeeping Presidential unilateralism), but that Republicans have lost and are going out with a whimper.

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  2. Not sure how to respond, Tom. First, the "financial collapse" is not an exogenous event. The government is causing it. Now, they may be unintentionally causing it; I still haven't decided on that issue. But bad real estate loans per se would not have threatened the global financial system. (I will have a mises.org on this next week.)

    So on that score, it seems odd that you say, "McCain is losing, despite the financial collapse, so I think that proves there is no coup." That would be like saying, "Because Yeltsin didn't get run over by the tank, that proved the military wasn't trying to do anything." (Or something; I know very little history, especially world history.)

    Also, did you see that the feds are literally and publicly using the term "regime change" to refer to US financial markets?! If they slipped and said there had been a coup, I think a lot of libertarians still wouldn't believe it. (You're not the only one to pooh-pooh Wolf's analysis.)

    Last point: Where I think Wolf is naive, is in thinking that Obama is outside the system. I think he quickly reversed himself on the war etc., because he had a Coming to Satan talk with some folks who told him that if he were going to pull the troops out immediately, he would (a) lose the election and/or (b) not last 10 days in office. And for (b), they might have given him a DVD of "JFK" to drive the point home.

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  3. I would agree that the government lies at the root of the bubble, but a bubble collapse was inevitable. All that the government is doing now is exacerbating it.

    My point about a coup is simply that if there is one, it's obviously not one designed to keep Republicans in power. Thus, it doesn't seem to be a Republican coup. If there is a coup, who owns it?

    I'm with you on Obama and (a), but see no evidence for (b). Do you?

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