GOP must repudiate Limbaugh or be defined by him

[Emit]

GOP must repudiate Limbaugh or be defined by him
Monday
September 28th, 2009
By Menachem Z. Rosensaft

New York (JTA) — One stark difference between Democrats and Republicans is that Democrats appear to be far more willing to confront and publicly denounce bigots and extremists in their own fold. This has been highlighted by the GOP leadership’s failure to condemn Rush Limbaugh’s divisive, race-baiting diatribes.

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Most recently, Limbaugh not only listed “the similarities between the Democrat Party of today and the Nazi Party in Germany,” but compared President Obama to Adolf Hitler.

Here’s what Limbaugh told his nationwide audience: “Obama’s got a health care logo that’s right out of Adolf Hitler’s playbook”; “Obama is asking citizens to rat each other out like Hitler did”; the president “is sending out his brownshirts to head up opposition to genuine American citizens who want no part of what Barack Obama stands for and is trying to stuff down our throats”; and “Adolf Hitler, like Barack Obama, also ruled by dictate.”

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Limbaugh has a long history of inciting the far-right grass-roots against any political figures who do not reflect his white, fundamentalist Christian, conservative, anti-minority, anti-pluralistic, anti-egalitarian view of the world.

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For Holocaust survivors and their families in particular, Limbaugh’s demagogic screeds have ominous overtones with which we are all too familiar.

One would have expected Republican Party leaders who purport to be in the tradition of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt to speak out against Limbaugh’s hate mongering. Instead, Colin Powell has been one of the very few prominent Republicans with the integrity to take on Limbaugh.

“The problem I have with the (Republican) party right now,” Powell told Larry King last month, is that when Limbaugh “says things that I consider to be completely outrageous, and I respond to it, I would like to see other members of the party do likewise. But they don’t.”

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As McCain, Romney, Giuliani and Cantor all acknowledge, Limbaugh wields a great deal of influence in both the Republican Party and the conservative movement. That makes him a dangerous, destructive cancer on both the Republican Party and the American body politic.

The GOP’s leaders now have to make a choice: They can either allow themselves and their party to be defined by Rush Limbaugh, or they must denounce and renounce him once and for all.

Menachem Z. Rosensaft is an adjunct professor of law at Cornell University and vice president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants.

http://www.jewishchronicle.org/article.php?article_id=11705