Dum Pendebat Filius

When I first heard about this, I thought it was a joke, but it’s for real, readers. Rush Limbaugh has spoken out in support of Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, eagerly accusing President Obama of “targeting Christians.” Look at what Rush said, according to transcripts of his radio show posted on his own official website:

Lord’s Resistance Army are Christians. They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan. And Obama has sent troops, United States troops to remove them from the battlefield, which means kill them. That’s what the lingo means, “to help regional forces remove from the battlefield,” meaning capture or kill.

So that’s a new war, a hundred troops to wipe out Christians in Sudan, Uganda, and – (interruption) no, I’m not kidding. Jacob Tapper just reported it. Now, are we gonna help the Egyptians wipe out the Christians? Wouldn’t you say that we are? I mean the Coptic Christians are being wiped out, but it wasn’t just Obama that supported that. The conservative intelligentsia thought it was an outbreak of democracy. Now they’ve done a 180 on that, but they forgot that they supported it in the first place. Now they’re criticizing it.

Lord’s Resistance Army objectives. I have them here. “To remove dictatorship and stop the oppression of our people.” Now, again Lord’s Resistance Army is who Obama sent troops to help nations wipe out. The objectives of the Lord’s Resistance Army, what they’re trying to accomplish with their military action in these countries is the following: “To remove dictatorship and stop the oppression of our people; to fight for the immediate restoration of the competitive multiparty democracy in Uganda; to see an end to gross violation of human rights and dignity of Ugandans; to ensure the restoration of peace and security in Uganda, to ensure unity, sovereignty, and economic prosperity beneficial to all Ugandans, and to bring to an end the repressive policy of deliberate marginalization of groups of people who may not agree with the LRA ideology.” Those are the objectives of the group that we are fighting, or who are being fought and we are joining in the effort to remove them from the battlefield.

Questions:

1. Does Rush Limbaugh have the slightest clue who the Lord’s Resistance Army are? Had he ever even heard of them before yesterday? Is he aware of their well-documented record of atrocities and crimes against humanity in Africa’s Great Lakes region?
2. Is El Rushbo (“talent on loan from God”) purposely playing his listeners for fools, pretending that the LRA are Christian freedom fighters (who he seems to think “are fighting the Muslims in Sudan,” which I suppose he and his audience would consider, ipso facto, a Good Thing) and ignoring the atrocities, the children abducted and made to serve as foot soldiers or sex slaves, etc? None of this is news, folks… anyone who pays any attention at all to Africa has been hearing about this stuff for years and years.
3. Is Rush aware that the LRA’s founder and leader, Joseph Kony, is wanted by the ICC for crimes against humanity?
4. How many of Rush’s listeners will bother to google “lord’s resistance army” and learn the truth? How many of them will just be angry about Obama’s “attack on Christians” in Africa?
5. Why isn’t Rush ever ashamed of himself when he plays his fans and listeners for fools, treats them like chumps, misleads them like this?
6. Why is President Obama sending 100 US military advisors to Uganda to help put down the LRA? Why now?
7. If we’re going to send 100 military advisors to Africa, wouldn’t they be put to better use helping the Amisom forces fight Al-Shabaab in southern Somalia?

UPDATE: Digby’s tribal take

Digby seems to think Rush doesn’t know any better:

Considering that Rush is a leader of a rather large group of people who insist that Hitler was a leftist, I’m not entirely surprised. Rightwingers’ worldview is so Manichean they literally cannot conceive of anyone a Democrat or liberal might oppose not being the good guys — particularly if that enemy calls itself “Christian.” (Again, the proof offered for Hitler’s alleged leftism is that the word “socialism” appears in the name of the Nazi Party. So there you go.)

I think that’s too pat an answer. Rush knows better; I don’t like him (to put it mildly), but the man’s not stupid. It’s not that Rush actually thinks the LRA are “the good guys” (I’m answering some of my own questions, which I posed above, by the way), it’s that he’s playing his listeners for fools, purposely trying to mislead them. If he can score a point against Obama by making it sound like the LRA are “the good guys” (“Christians… fighting the Muslims in Sudan”), he’ll do it, secure in the knowledge that most Americans have never heard of the LRA and won’t bother to look for any information about them.

UPDATE: “Half truths”

A commenter who identifies as a “Rush Listener” wants me to point out that Rush did mention the possibility of LRA having behaved badly, and that he told his listeners he’d get the facts. Who knows? Maybe he’ll do just that. Here’s the relevant comment from Rush’s transcript:

Is that right? The Lord’s Resistance Army is being accused of really bad stuff? Child kidnapping, torture, murder, that kind of stuff? Well, we just found out about this today. We’re gonna do, of course, our due diligence research on it. But nevertheless we got a hundred troops being sent over there to fight these guys — and they claim to be Christians.

I don’t believe for a minute that Rush didn’t know any better — I think he’s cynically playing his listeners for chumps. But perhaps he’ll do the right thing and tell his listeners the truth about the LRA.