Searching Rush’s website, the only mention I have seen of the LRA since last Friday’s show has been one mention of how Rush’s sidekicks were mentioned on the Senate floor during a speech by Sen. Inhofe (who was speaking in support of President Obama’s decision to send Special Forces soldiers to Africa to help put down the LRA):

Dawn, Brian, and Snerdley all made their debuts on the Senate floor yesterday all because I happened to be misinformed about something. [...] We said they were sending in a hundred people as advisors and so forth, but I wanted to play the sound bites primarily ’cause you three are now in the Congressional Record. All three of you. And you’re in the Congressional Record because you didn’t know something! How does it feel? (laughing)

“I happened to be misinformed about something.” That dismissive sentence, I am sure, is the closest he’ll ever come to “due diligence research.” Rush has long since moved on. He scored his cheap little political point — President Obama is sending US troops to Africa, “targeting Christians” — and now he just says “I happened to be misinformed” and lets the matter drop. That’s his “due diligence research.” I was hoping he might surprise me and show a little class (and intellectual honesty) for once, but that did not happen, because Rush Limbaugh is simply not a very good person.

Even if Rush does the right thing here, there’s no way for him to come out of this looking good. There are only two possibilities:

1. Rush knew all along what the LRA is all about, and he was just playing his listeners for fools. If this is the case, he’s a liar and a demagogue, willing to say anything if it makes President Obama and/or the Democratic Party look bad.
2. Rush really didn’t know any better, and he thought the LRA were good Christian freedom fighters. He didn’t even do the minimal level of homework — not even a Google search — before accusing the President of “targeting Christians.” If this is the case, he has made a real fool out of himself, inadvertently speaking out in defense of a murder gang who kidnap children and force them to serve as guerillas or sex slaves.

In neither case has Rush displayed any of the “excellence in broadcasting” of which he is wont to boast.

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.

There are times when I consider cancelling my NRA membership, though, because the NRA goes far beyond gun rights to support a political platform which I consider reactionary, repellent, and deeply wrong-headed.

When President Obama took office, the NRA and its members had a collective meltdown. They freaked out. For example, .45 ACP ammunition became nearly impossible to find for months, as gullible fools were frantically buying it in bulk and stockpiling it, convinced that Obama would soon be sending ATF/Gestapo storm troops to everyone’s house to confiscate their guns and ammo.

Obama’s been in office since January 2009, and he has done nothing — nothing at all — to abrogate or threaten anyone’s Second Amendment rights. But according to NRA Executive VP Wayne LaPierre, that’s all part of Obama’s dastardly plot.

According to LaPierre, Obama has purposely hidden his radical plan to outlaw gun ownership and confiscate everyone’s guns… he’s waiting until he gets re-elected in 2012, and THEN he’ll come for your guns!

Read it and weep…

They’ll say gun owners — they’ll say they left them alone… In public, the president will remind us that he’s put off calls from his party to renew the old Clinton [assault-weapons] ban, that he hasn’t pushed for new gun control laws… The president will offer the Second Amendment lip service and hit the campaign trail saying he’s actually been good for the Second Amendment. But it’s a big fat stinking lie! … It’s all part of a massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and hide his true intentions to destroy the Second Amendment in our country… Before the president was even sworn into office, they met and they hatched a conspiracy of public deception to try to guarantee his re-election in 2012.

Readers, what can you say about this? This is just fucking pathetic. LaPierre wants to make sure that every NRA member does the following:

1. DO NOT EVEN THINK ABOUT voting for Obama next year (not that too many NRA members would be inclined to do so anyway, but there are more of us liberals who support gun rights than you might think).
2. WRITE A CHECK to the NRA so they can keep fighting Obama’s imaginary “conspiracy of public deception,” which only the NRA are sufficiently clairvoyant to detect and brave enough to fight.
3. CONTINUE TO STOCKPILE guns and ammunition, since the day is surely coming when we won’t be able to buy them anymore.

This is exactly the kind of reactionary garbage that makes me question whether I should continue being an NRA member. Nobody else is protecting our Second-Amendment rights, and somebody has to; but how can I continue, in good conscience, to support an organization that spouts this kind of kooky-con paranoid bullshit?

Now that a Democrat is in the White House, we are treated to the disgusting spectacle of libs and Dems cheering and partying because the Executive Branch has gone far beyond Bush — the Executive Branch is now literally killing US citizens who are suspected of Terrorism, without bothering to charge them with a crime or present any evidence. No judicial or legislative oversight, no accountability, just a drone and a missile.

The kooky-con Right saw nothing amiss with the Bush administration’s terrible civil-liberties record — they either slumbered contentedly or led cheers for it. Torture? Surveillance with no warrant? Indefinite imprisonment without habeas corpus? Right on, they shouted. As soon as a Democrat moved into the White House, the kooky-cons suddenly woke up and got very concerned, afraid that their President was a Socialist Nazi dictator, an enemy of the Freedom they suddenly remembered they’d once thought they loved.

Meanwhile, the pseudo-lib Left pretended to be deeply concerned when Bush locked Suspected Terrorists up without charging them with any crime, but now that the President, who happens to be a Democrat, is not just locking terror-suspect citizens up but killing them, without bothering to charge them with any crime, these quondam civil libertarians are cheering and partying. Go Dems!

We live in a society that has really lost its way, readers. If you’d told me fifteen years ago that I’d see Americans cheering and partying because the US government was killing US citizens without bothering to charge them with a crime, I’d have told you you were a fool — Americans would never stand for that, much less cheer about it. But now we live in that America: our civil liberties, the core of what makes America special, what makes America the best country on earth, are disappearing, and most of us aren’t sorry to see them go — we’d apparently rather not have freedom, because with freedom comes the responsibility to use it wisely, and we’d rather have the illusory sense of safety that comes from living in a Security State instead. And things are going to keep getting worse for a long time before they get any better, I fear. I see very little reason for hope in the foreseeable future.

UPDATE: Who gets it?

Here are some people who seem to get it:

• Amy Davidson, who writes the excellent “Close Reads” blog for The New Yorker, gets it.
• When it comes to civil liberties and the Bill of Rights, Glenn Greenwald always gets it.
• Kevin Williamson, at NRO’s blog “The Corner,” gets it.
• Ron Paul (with whom I usually disagree quite strongly) gets it.
• The ACLU, needless to say, gets it.

See Also:

• Jake Tapper asked White House spokesperson Jay Carney some good, tough questions about Awlaki’s killing. Carney’s answers were, sadly, very bad indeed.

“But I saw the liberals hated George Bush. It was vicious. And I thought about it, and I didn’t get it. He was no worse than the others, was he? And I’d ask my liberal friends, ‘Well, why do you hate him?’ They’d all say: ‘He lied about WMD.’ Okay. You love [John F.] Kennedy. Kennedy didn’t write Profiles in Courage — he lied about that. ‘Bush is in bed with the Saudis!’ Okay, Kennedy was in bed with the mafia.”

So: it doesn’t make sense to “hate” George W. Bush for invading Iraq and causing hundreds of thousands of deaths on the pretext of non-existent WMDs, because a prominent Democrat lied about writing a book fifty years ago. It’s the same thing!

This is why I’m sick of tribal politics. It’s just about point-scoring: if somebody on the other team points out that somebody on my team did something bad, I have to come up with a counter-example of somebody on the other team who did something bad, too. It doesn’t have to make sense, it just has to help me say My team good, your team bad. I just don’t have time for this anymore. I used to get caught up in this foolishness, too, but it’s a waste of time. Our problems will only continue to get worse as long as we’re divided into two brain-dead tribes who spend their time shouting at each other.

If you are interested, why not follow me on my travel blog?

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

Palin refers to, but does not link to, something she read by Thomas Sowell (or, more likely, something somebody told her Sowell said — Palin, by her own admission, is not much of a reader), so I don’t know whether the quotes she puts around “death panel” and “level of productivity in society” are just what they call “scare-quotes,” or whether she’s quoting something Thomas Sowell said, or what.

But that’s kind of beside the point. What makes me wonder whether I’m actually reading this, or if it’s all a weird dream, is the sheer lunacy of her assertions.

Does she actually, honestly believe that President Obama has proposed to convene a “death panel” that will judge the “level of productivity in society” of individual American citizens, and deny said citizens access to health care if said citizens are not deemed sufficiently productive?

Aside from the fact that no such proposal has ever been made, that’s one of the craziest things I’ve heard all year. Is there any human being who actually believes something that wacky?

Readers, I think that’s too crazy even for Sarah Palin to actually, literally believe it. I think she’s playing her admirers for a bunch of fools, which is pretty much par for the course in America in the year 2009.

We Americans are in very deep trouble, readers. Our economy is in very bad shape. Our armed forces are still bogged down in two completely useless wars in Southwest Asia. There are a lot of problems we need to solve. Yet we citizens have to go out of our way to get the most basic facts about any of the issues we’re facing as a nation. How come?

Well, one of the biggest problems is that we’ve got a political press corps who believe, and openly state, that it’s not their job to evaluate whether the utterances of public figures are true or not, a press corps that is just hopelessly addicted to bullshit, gossip and trivia, whose idea of “reporting” boils down to He said this, and she said that, and how will that affect their popularity ratings in the next public-opinion poll?, who could not care less about policy — they find it boring — and prefer to look at politics as an extension of celebrity gossip. We’ve got a completely polarized electorate, who look at everything through the lens of tribal affiliation (and this, readers, is basically why I quit blogging, because I’m just as guilty of that as anybody, and I’m sick to death of it).

All our political “news” is just thinly-disguised celebrity gossip, and all our political “commentary” is just one-sided propaganda and bullshit from a bunch of rich people who collect big fat paychecks from even richer people to play their viewers (or readers, or listeners) for a bunch of fools. Olbermann and Maddow are just as bad as Hannity and El Rushbo when it comes to playing their audience for fools (although they’re not quite as nasty and hateful as their right-wing counterparts, I will give them that).

Worse, we are living in a culture that openly scorns knowledge in favor of belief. If you know something I don’t, that doesn’t matter — what I believe is just as important as what you know. President Bush governed our nation for eight years on the basis of what he believed, rather than what he or anybody else knew, and look where it got us, readers.

And so maybe that’s why Sarah Palin feels comfortable saying, apparently in all seriousness, that President Obama would like to put her parents and her son in front of a “death squad” — because that’s what she believes, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not in real life, because she believes it?

That’s a possibility. But I still don’t buy it. Not even Sarah Palin is ignorant enough to believe this “death squad” bullshit. No, she’s playing her fan base, the unfortunate souls who actually take her seriously, for a bunch of fools. That’s how we roll in today’s America.

Why do you think my mom is in Kenya right now, readers? She’s doing secretary-of-state stuff to fool the MSM, but she really went to Africa to “take care of” the person who leaked a copy of my birth certificate to the truth-seekers all over the Internet.

I voted for Obama last year and I appreciate how he has already rolled back a lot of stupid Bush administration policies. In terms of social and scientific policy, at least, he’s doing markedly better than what I would have expected from a McBush presidency.

However, I am starting to look sourly on his stimulus bill. A recent New York Times op-ed, Stimulus for Skeptics sums everything up best.

That’s not a recipe for doing nothing. It’s a recipe for skepticism. And it leads to some guiding principles for those designing the $500 billion stimulus plan the next administration seems set on: Don’t just throw more money into the sugar rush. Spend money on projects that will enhance the long-term economic health of the country even without a crisis. Do what you would do anyway, just do it faster.

And yet so many are willing to throw money at a sugar rush, because of partisanship, the cancer that is destroying this country. Many on the left are now coming out and saying that every sensible economist agrees with stimulus. That’s just not the case. Many have pointed out—rightly so—that it is full of teensy-weensy tax exemptions and special interest projects that won’t do much good in the long run. There are some good things, like support for high-speed rail, which is a long term gain, but on the whole it’s going to plunge us deeper into astronomical debt, continued from Raygun and Bush I and II, from which we will recover only after many decades.

I’m really disappointed in the childish polarization we see in both parties today, which casts the whole policy debate in terms of false binary choices, which both tend to be the wrong ones. I’m really disappointed in the dogma, too. It seems people are more willing to toe their respective party lines unswervingly than to steer clear of intellectual laziness and actually bother to listen to what other people are saying.

I don’t hate the USA, but if we keep up this horseshit, we no longer deserve to be the leading world power.