Posts on Rush Limbaugh

There's a long history in American politics of exploiting divisions and fanning bigotry to win elections. In recent decades those strategies were honed by Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. Now the torch has passed to Steve Schmidt, and he’s done just about everything possible to fan the flames.

Schmidt’s tactics and the right-wing echo chamber have convinced millions of Americans that the nation is about to elect someone who hates America and “pals around with terrorists.” Just take a look at this video of supporters outside a Palin rally:

In recent weeks, the right wing has grown even more frenzied as McCain and his allies pushed the ACORN voter fraud hoax. Not only is Obama a Manchurian candidate, the thinking goes, but his evildoer comrades at ACORN are trying to steal the election. It’s little wonder that some people are going berserk.

McCain, Palin, Schmidt, Limbaugh, Hannity and the rest of them have created something very powerful, but very ugly, and it’s grown too big for them to control. Here is just some of what happens when you train your pit bulls to fear and hate and attack, and then they get loose:

Obama lawn sign replaced by rebel flag

Obama sign burned on black family's front lawn

Anti-Obama Fury Spills Over Into Down-Ticket Contests: "Bomb Obama"

Death threat, vandalism hit ACORN after McCain comments

ACORN Deluged with Threatening and Racist Voicemails and Emails

Obama Called a Socialist and 'Un-American'

McCain supporters heckle early voters

Dead bear covered with Obama signs found at school

People For the American Way is tracking such incidents around the nation. If something happens in your community that people should know about, please get in touch.

Current New York Times best-selling author and proven liar Jerome Corsi has been lavished with attention by the likes of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh for his slanderous new book about Barack Obama.

But before Corsi put Obama in his crosshairs, he plied his wares in the GOP presidential primary. Fox and Limbaugh treat Corsi like he’s a legitimate political commentator, so we’ll trust they’ll have Corsi back on to discuss his groundbreaking work on McCain:

Group tied to al-Qaida backs McCain for prez
March 02, 2008
By Jerome R. Corsi

McCain fortune traced to organized crime
February 26, 2008
By Jerome R. Corsi

Influence peddling claims dog McCain
February 15, 2008
By Jerome R. Corsi

John McCain funded by Soros since 2001
February 12, 2008
By Jerome R. Corsi

McCain aide touts 'Mexico first' policy
January 25, 2008
By Jerome R. Corsi

Ben Stein’s anti-evolution attack film, “Expelled,” has finally arrived, grossing $3 million over the weekend, thanks to a church-based roll-out by the marketers that brought you “The Passion of the Christ.” Critics have savaged the documentary—which claims widespread persecution of creationists in academia and warns of a direct link between the theory of evolution and the Holocaust—as a dishonest work of propaganda, but, not surprisingly, the movie has a lot of fans among the Religious Right.

“Expelled” has been promoted heavily in right-wing media this month. Stein appeared on Focus on the Family radio, where the movie received the “enthusiastic” endorsement of James Dobson. Producer Mark Mathis appeared on WallBuilders Live, the radio show of premier church-state integrationist David Barton, to discuss “the persecution of the many by an elite few.” Rush Limbaugh exuberantly promoted it on his show; apparently, the movie taught him that “Darwinism, of course, does not permit for the existence of a supreme being, a higher power, or a God.”

Stein was also interviewed by the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow, while executive producer Logan Craft hit WorldNetDaily. Baptist Press, the official outlet of the Southern Baptist Convention, featured an op-ed by Stein and a series of articles pushing the film. The producers gave a private screening to Brent Bozell of the far-right Media Research Center. (He loved it.)

“Expelled” is also featured by the late D. James Kennedy’s Coral Ridge Ministries, which offers its own product line equating Darwin and Hitler. While some “Expelled” cheerleaders express sympathy for the “Intelligent Design” advocates who have been “persecuted” supposedly (the National Center for Science Education has their realistic back-stories here), most on the Right seem to be especially enchanted by the film’s reliance on a half-baked linking of evolution to Nazism and Stalinism.

“Expelled,” wrote World magazine editor and faith-based initiatives architect Marvin Olasky, “rightly equates Darwinian stifling of free speech with the Communist attempt to enslave millions behind the Berlin Wall.”

The real question is: Did Darwinism bulwark Hitlerian hatred by providing a scientific rationale for killing those considered less fit in the struggle for survival?

The answer to that question is an unambiguous yes.

Richard Weikart of the “Intelligent Design” group, the Discovery Institute, defended the Darwin-Hitler connection as critical: “[W]hat is most objectionable about the Nazis' worldview? Isn't it that they had no respect for human life?” Weikart, who wrote a book entitled “From Darwin to Hitler,” added, “the Nazis' devaluing of human life derived from Darwinian ideology....”

Gary DeMar of American Vision was so inspired he branched out on his own, linking evolution to the fundamentalist polygamist cult that’s been in the news recently.

Given the worldview shift that has taken place in America, none of this is of any consequence. Evolutionary and atheistic assumptions are standard worldview thinking in every public school classroom in America. So then, why is it wrong with having forced sex with young girls? It’s evolution in action. …

The secularists should be proud of what these polygamists are doing. They are confirming the evolutionary thesis of Dawkins and his selfish gene hypothesis.

President Bush addressed the National Religious Broadcasters Convention and vowed to veto the Fairness Doctrine if it ever reaches his desk: "We know who these advocates of so-called balance really have in their sights: shows hosted by people like Rush Limbaugh or James Dobson, or many of you here today. By insisting on so-called balance, they want to silence those they don't agree with. The truth of the matter is, they know they cannot prevail in the public debate of ideas ... But I'll tell you this: If Congress should ever pass any legislation that stifles your right to express your views, I'm going to veto it."

After American Family Radio and Chuck Norris paved the way, the floodgates have apparently opened for religious-right commentators to blame the tragic mass shooting at Virginia Tech on their political bugbears, such as (in Norris’s words) the “secular progressive agenda.”

In an op-ed in the Greeley, Colorado Tribune, local pastor Steven Grant meditates on “the deeper questions and overall trend patterns” surrounding the shooting and traces the “[e]scalation of violence and a number of other social ills” to a single point: the 1961 Supreme Court case that banned government-run prayer in public schools. For evidence, Grant turns to David Barton, the GOP operative and crackpot pseudo-historian whom Grant laughably calls “perhaps the nation’s leading historian.”

Landmark Legal Foundation’s Levin calls radio talker “the foremost advocate for freedom and democracy in the world.”

Talker says right-wing candidate “not a thoroughbred conservative"

FRC’s Perkins offers “cautious praise” for ethics reform—plus attack on “anti-family” agenda. Focus on Family warns of stem-cell standoff. LaBarbera fears “pro-homosexuality ‘sexual orientation’ bills.” Also: Attacks on Pelosi from IWF and Rush.

“There’s a basis,” the radio talker says, because “Harold Ford has dated a white woman.” Read more on the ad.

Pat Robertson doesn’t go quite as far as some on the right who have said Michael J. Fox was “pathetic,”  “lying,” or saying things that were “untrue” in the recent embryonic stem-cell research ad featuring Fox, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease.  

Robertson did however say in a segment about the upcoming Senate race in Missouri that Rush Limbaugh was pointing out that Fox “seemed a bit over the top.”

Robertson scientifically bolstered his skepticism adding:

“[Fox] plays a role in a show called ‘Boston Legal’ and he doesn’t do all that gyrating back and forth and that. Whatever disease his Parkinson’s is showing he doesn’t have all that problem. Now is that too much meds or not enough?”

At least a few people at CBN seemed to have learned to avoid compounding Robertson’s (to put it mildly) insensitive faux pas.  Christian Broadcasting Network’s political correspondent David Brody didn’t bite, and instead of answering Robertson’s question about whether or not Fox had taken “too much or not enough” medication launched into his story about the impact of the ads on Missouri voters saying it was hard to tell what impact the commercial was having in Missouri as most of the people he had asked about it still seemed confused over the issues.

[View the video highlight: Broadband or Dial-Up.]

Rush Limbaugh says he’s off his meds or acting in the video; National Review and Princeton’s Robert George call it “slander”; Maryland’s Family Protection Lobby says candidates are “exploiting” Fox.

On his radio show yesterday, comedian Rush Limbaugh encouraged Republican efforts to deliberately disenfranchise voters.

I mean, you take a look at the average Democrat voter registration drive, you can take for every hundred thousand voters they register, the cumulative IQ would probably be less than a pencil eraser. So when it comes time for the election, half of them can be fooled in saying, "No, it's not Election Day. It's tomorrow, Wednesday." And they show up on Wednesday to vote when the polls are closed, and the Democrats claim a trick has been played on them. That's how stupid some of their voters are.

Limbaugh then pointed out a specific example of a ‘successful’ campaign to deny registered Democrats the right to vote:

You think I'm lying? That happened. Republicans did a dirty trick and sent a flier out a week early and said due to unfortunate circumstances, certain precincts, Election Day will be held on Wednesday, blah, blah, blah, blah. Democrats heard about it, this is such a dirty trick. They were worried because they knew it would work, because half their voters are stupid idiots! They have to be when you look at the way they vote.

Right-wing voter suppression campaigns are nothing new. People For the American Way Foundation’s latest report, The New Face of Jim Crow: Voter Suppression in America, highlights methods of intimidation and deception such as this, plus budding legislative proposals that would keep eligible voters, many of them African- American, from the polls. Supporters of these proposals claim they are to bringing “integrity” to the process, but can the Right really be trusted to bring “integrity” to election reform while Mr. Limbaugh brags about the ease with which his friends work to suppress the vote?

One would hope that Mr. Limbaugh would feel compelled to report such egregious violations of the law to the proper authorities. In the alternative, now that Mr. Limbaugh has indicated his knowledge of, or complicity in, voter fraud, perhaps the feds should pay him a visit.

Media Matters caught Rush Limbaugh saying something characteristically idiotic

Rush Limbaugh blamed "the left" and the United Nations' Children Fund (UNICEF) for "the latest crisis" of "obesity among those who are impoverished," adding that Americans "[d]idn't teach them how to ... slaughter a cow to get the butter; we gave them the butter." Limbaugh also called the "Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF" campaign "[o]ne of the biggest scams on the face of the earth" because its goal was to "get everybody thinking the United Nations is feeding poor people."

According to the transcript provided by Media Matters, Limbaugh claimed

I think you might then say that the obesity crisis could be the fault of government, liberal government. Food stamps, all those -- you know, I'm gonna tell you people a story. I -- just, well, the government, you could say, is killing these people because we know obesity kills, and the government's killing the poor. The Bush administration is killing the poor with too much food.

Yeah, this cannot be attributed to the simple fact that healthy foods are generally far more expensive than unhealthy foods, so it must be that the poor are getting too much food.

As everyone knows, if there is one thing the poor are always complaining about, it’s having way too much food.