October 25, 2016

“A Glittering Jewel of Colossal Ignorance”

Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh called me a “glittering jewel.”
Actually he called me a “glittering jewel of colossal ignorance.”
But I no more took his quotation about me out of context just now than he took mine.

First, the Rush clip, in its full context:

Now, what I actually said:

See a difference?

OK, it may be hard to spot in the unedited clips. So here’s the same thing tightly focused.

Rush playing me on air (without mentioning he intentionally tampered with the audio to remove a crucial sentence):

What I actually said:

Let me spell it out.

Rush claims I said:

“If you heard Rush Limbaugh today, he specifically compared Barack Obama to Hitler. This is not rhetoric that’s coming out of nowhere. People understand the tea party activists are drawing Hitler mustaches on Obama. They’re doing it for a reason”

What I actually said was this:

“David, if you heard Rush Limbaugh today, he specifically compared Barack Obama to Hitler. He said in fact that Bart Stupak was the Neville Chamberlain to Barack Obama’s Hitler. This is not rhetoric that’s coming out of nowhere. People understand the tea party activists are drawing Hitler mustaches on Obama. They’re doing it for a reason”

Why do you think Rush removed that sentence that specifically showed where he compared Obama to Hitler then went on a long rant saying, “Adolf Hitler was not mentioned on this program yesterday” ?

Maybe it’s because he mentioned the Obama/Hitler comparison on the program the day before yesterday and thinks his dittoheads are too stupid to remember two days ago?

You see, Rush made the Obama/Hitler comparison on Monday:

“That executive order, totally laughable, Stupak just wanted his “notice me” moment. Stupak is no different than Neville Chamberlain, came back with that little letter from Hitler.”

Then on Wednesday, Rush says, with a wink and a nod to himself, “we never said Hitler yesterday (Tuesday) when he knows full well he made the comment Monday! He calls it: a total lie!

So Rush, while I stand by my condemnation of what you said on Monday, I made a mistake in thinking it was said on Tuesday. Now will you apologize for implying you never made the comparison and for tampering with my audio (without even a clearly heard “audio click”) to take out the sentence where I specify exactly what you said?

Rush owes me an apology, a retraction, and the full playing of the accurate clip on air. He also should tell his listeners the truth: that he made the odious Obama/Hitler comparison, even if he made it one day earlier. And it’s certainly not the only time Rush has compared President Obama to Hitler.

Rush Limbaugh doctored the audio and transcript of what I said yesterday to delete the one, short key sentence where I detail Rush’s comparison of Obama to Hitler. Rush wanted his dittohead listeners to think I was making it all up.

Stung by my forceful comments on MSNBC condemning his comparison of President Obama to Adolf Hitler, Rush strongly suggested yesterday he would never, ever do that. Perhaps his defensiveness would have been a bit more persuasive had he not begun right away again with a comparison of the President’s health care plan to that of the Nazis:

Now, as far as this Hitler business, one of the first things the National Socialist Party did was try to nationalize health care.

Think about the logic here: first, Rush makes the dubious claim that the Nazis “tried” to nationalize health care. Is it true? Well, I do seem to recall the Nazis murdered the handicapped, tried to sterilize homosexuals, fired all the Jewish doctors, euthanized the infirm, and practiced ghastly experiments, designed more to exquisitely torture their victim than to determine anything of medical significance. That’s what Nazi Health Care is infamous for.

First of all, I want to ensure Rush — and all of the wacko dittoheads that believe every word he said as if he knew something of academic value rather than having flunked out of Southeast Missouri University in his first year — that President Obama’s plan has none of the Nazi elements I quoted above.

But what if it’s true? What if the Third Reich actually did provide good heterosexual “Aryans” with decent health care? Does this make it an awful idea? Let’s assume it’s true, for the sake of argument, and see how far we can go with the same logic.

What else did the Nazis do? They greatly expanded their military spending. And, you know what, Republicans also believe in greatly expanding our military spending. Aha!

Now am I calling Republicans Nazis? Oh no, not me. I’m only saying, using wacko-Rush-logic, that Republican policies are similar to the Nazis, that they “head in that direction”. That’s all I’m saying. Just don’t blame me if some of my supporters misconstrue the angry rhetoric and draw Hitler mustaches on Mitch McConnell…

Why pick on just Republicans? Let’s take the same Rush-logic one dramatic step further. The great Fascist leader of Italy Benito Mussolini was quite famous for making the trains run on time. By Rush-logic, anyone who believes in on-time trains is a Fascist! Watch out for Amtrak workers!!! And is it any coincidence our Vice-President Joe Biden is a big fan of trains? Hmmm? I’m not saying… I’m just saying…

But the real crime in Rush’s rush to trash me comes from Rush’s intentional tampering of the video where I made the claim on MSNBC that Rush is doing his best to enrage the public with his phony Obama/Hitler comparisons.

The full unedited transcript of the clip, obtained from Rush’s own website, is below in bold, with my comments in brackets.

Now, as far as this Hitler business, one of the first things the National Socialist Party did was try to nationalize health care. I mean, facts are facts: The president is a socialist. The number ought to be much higher than 67%. And we got the New York Times saying so today. We’ve got what’s-her-face, Sebelius, saying so today. We got John Dingell: “Control the people.” Worse than socialist. Well, Shuster was mentioning all that to one of his guests, a guy by the name of Mark Levine, who is an attorney (not Mark “Le-vin,” Mark “Le-veen”) and Shuster said, “Why is it fair to pin this on Limbaugh?”

LEVINE: If you heard Rush Limbaugh today, he specifically compared Barack Obama to Hitler. (sic) This is not rhetoric that’s coming out of nowhere. People understand the tea party activists are drawing Hitler mustaches on Obama. They’re doing it for a reason. There are a lot of mostly angry, white, Southern, male, fundamentalist Christians who are very angry.

[Note the [sic]  [Sic], for those of us who know grammar, means emphatically that this is what was actually said. You put it in a transcription so that readers know the transcriber did not make a typographical error, as in “He said, ‘You was (sic) a friend of mine.'”  This lets the reader know that the speaker was using bad grammar and not the person transcribing it. Here Rush slanders me by saying inaccurately that I never said the sentence in between the two he mentioned.  He should have put in an ellipsis (…) which shows when someone has removed content.  But that would let his readers know he tampered with the audio.  They would have rejected the silly notion that I couldn’t detail when Rush compared Obama to Hitler, when, in fact, I specifically called it out.]

[Oh, and for the record, I happen to be a Southern white male. But not angry.  🙂 ]

SHUSTER. Oh.

[Actually, this wasn’t Shuster but the Republican guest. Oh well.  This is Rush’s transcript.  Guess I should say “(sic)” after Shuster.

LEVINE: They see their power being taken away, they see blacks in power, they see a woman Speaker of the House, they see a gay man as head of the Financial Services Committee, and they’re worried. The irony is this bill will actually help most of the people, they just don’t know it.

RUSH: A blooming idiot, a glittering jewel of colossal ignorance. Somebody help me: Did we even mention Adolf Hitler yesterday? It’s a total lie. Adolf Hitler was not mentioned on this program yesterday. We didn’t even talk about any of these Hitler videos yesterday, right? The word “Hitler” was not uttered on this program. And here comes the cliche: “Mostly angry, white, Southern, male, fundamentalist Christians. Very angry, see their power being taken away.” This is what passes for learned analysis. Do these guys get together after the show and do a circle you-know-what, ever? Or are they doing that underneath the desk during the show? What a bunch of blooming idiots, and this guy is an attorney, and it says here he has a radio show of his own? That’s probably the problem. Nobody listens to it and he’s ticked off about that.“

No one should be surprised that Rush regularly tampers with videos and says he things he knows to be untrue and then fakes disingenuousness when challenged.  “Who me?  I said nothing about Hitler yesterday. I said it the day before yesterday!” Just as no one should be surprised that neither the New York Times nor Health Secretary Katherine Sibelius called the President a socialist, even though Rush says so.

One more thing: when confronted with the Harris Poll showing 24% of Republicans think Obama is the Anti-Christ and 45% think he’s Muslim, Rush said:

“Well, I don’t know wh– (laughs) Anti-Christ and uh, and uh Muslims. I don’t know where they’re getting that, because that’s not a, uh (pause) part of the program. And I haven’t really made that one of our topics here. But uh–“

How come Rush didn’t say that’s not, uh, a, ummm TRUE?

Do you really need to ask?

And a final thought to discuss among yourselves, class: Do you think Rush regularly tampers with video without telling his naive listeners?