Q&A Friday: Rush Limbaugh

Question: “Rush limbaugh made an editorial about the events at Abu Ghraib being no worse than mild hazing. Surely he did not knpow that hazing is a crime in most states if not all and most schools have rules forbidding hazing. Isn’t Rush an embarrasment to the RW’ers with his drug addiction and his past stories coming out about his homosexuality. And then his latest assertion about an event that Bush said disgusted and disgraced him, but that Rush said was no more than just the crime of hazing?” — John7714

Answer: Let me take these out of order. First off, I’ve been hearing about “past stories coming out about (Rush’s) homosexuality” on left wing message boards for years now and I’ve never seen any of them that had any substance to them. They all turn out to be “Oooh, Rush was friends with someone who was gay” or “I heard about some guy who once said Rush was gay” type posts. It’s pure libel that impresses lackwits without basic fact checking skills.

As far as Rush’s pain killer abuse goes, while I do have more sympathy for someone has difficulty managing pain and gets addicted to drugs like Oxycontin than I do someone who say gets addicted to crack, heroin, or even marijuana. But if it turns out that Rush goes to jail for breaking the law, I won’t be one of the people complaining. I am strongly in favor of the drug war, I believe in harsh sentences for offenders and dealers, and if it turns out Rush ends up in the pokey over it (although that looks unlikely at this point), so be it.

Next, I have only been able to listen to Rush intermittently of late, so I don’t know everything he has said about Abu Ghraib. However, I have heard him downplay the torture that occurred there and I’ve noticed that Newsmax is doing the same thing. I understand where they are coming from, some of the things that went on could be fairly compared to hazing, but I don’t agree with their conclusions. Hazing is voluntary, what happened at Abu Ghraib was not. Also, there were people beaten to death at Abu Ghraib and forced to crawl over glass. Rapes were threatened, people’s families were dragged into it…it was loathsome, something that the responsible soldiers should spend time in a jail cell over.

With that being said, I disagree with the way the mainstream media has handled this just as much as I do with what Limbaugh and Newsmax have said about it. The media has obsessively focused on it, grossly overplayed the significance of what happened, & unfairly used it to attack our troops and President Bush. I think how Limbaugh and Newsmax handled things is a direct result of that, although I still don’t agree with them on this issue.

In any case, I like Rush a lot, he had a great deal of influence on me during my college years, and I’d still strongly recommend listening to him.

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