Taking the Klavan Challenge: Part IV

[Pamela Troy]

Limbaugh’s oeuvre is best described as “much of a muchness,” which is to say he embraces shallowness, incuriousness, and mendacity and wants his listeners to do the same. It’s not so much that Rush Limbaugh is lying to his listeners. It’s that he’s encouraging them to lie to themselves, showing them by example how, if they inadvertently stumble upon statements from President Obama that directly contradict their own assumption sthey can edit and twist them to fit those assumptions.

For instance:

President Obama says al Qaida is still determined to harm westerners and that the war in Iraq was a distraction from a shared goal with Europe to dismantle the terrorist network. Obama said Friday that the unpopular war in Iraq undermined Europe’s initial support for America after the 911 attacks. He says he wants to repair that relationship because the US in Europe will have a shared interest in rooting out Al Qaida. Obama says the world cannot expect, because somebody named Barack Hussein Obama got elected, that everything’s going to be okay.

Now, what, what is this? It’s okay to use Hussein in Europe? And it’s okay to warn, “hey, just because my middle name is Hussein doesn’t mean the Islamofascists are going to end up loving us?”

Any rational adult reading or hearing this will recognize it as the kind of deliberate obtuseness children sometimes engage in when they think they’re being clever. It’s so dumb that just explaining why it’s dumb feels degrading. We’re being asked to believe that a man Limbaugh’s age can’t tell the difference between someone invoking President Obama’s middle name in an effort to imply that Obama is somehow a secret Muslim and President Obama referring to the unimportance of that middle name when it comes to dealing with the very real threat of Al Qaida terrorism.

So what does he (President Obama) do? Once again, he goes over to European soil and blames the United States and excuses Europe for failing to join us in not just the war in Iraq but the War on Terror.

Here, Rush seems to be betting on his listeners either not having heard Obama’s speech, or being as willing as Rush is to engage in a sort of internal dishonesty. As anyone who actually listened to that speech knows, Obama specifically denounced European anti-Americanism. From President Obama’s Strasbourg speech on April 3:

”But in Europe, there is an anti-Americanism that is at once casual, but can also be insidious. Instead of recognising the good that America so often does in the world, there have been times where Europeans choose to blame America for much of what is bad.

“On both sides of the Atlantic, these attitudes have become all too common. They are not wise. They do not represent the truth. They threaten to widen the divide across the Atlantic and leave us both more isolated. They fail to acknowledge the fundamental truth that America cannot confront the challenges of this century alone, but that Europe cannot confront them without America.”

Acknowledging this, however, would be inconvenient. It does not fit into the myth embraced by Rush and his fans. So, he’s off and running with another story about what Obama and the liberals presumably believe:

But never mind, never mind, President Obama is willing to go over there and continue to spread and enlarge the myth that the only reason Europe didn’t support us is because everybody hated George W. Bush and hated the Iraq war because they thought the US was immoral.

A simpleminded “myth” I’ve yet to hear any liberal offer.

To be brutally frank, Rush most likely says these things because he’s dishonest. Not consciously dishonest, perhaps, but dishonest nevertheless. He’s aware on some level that -- as Stephen Colbert has so unforgettably put it -- reality has a liberal bias. Rather than alter his viewpoint to fit this reality, he attempts to edit reality for both himself and his listeners.

[mojowork_n]

1. Hmmm

"...he attempts to edit reality for both himself and his listeners."

Please, BE brutally frank.

Dishonesty is what it is. Whether it's willful ignorance or blind indifference to inconvenient facts, the end result (for anyone who listens for any length of time) is broadcast content in which ideology is always served first, trumping objective reality every time. It's a continuous, 24/7, never-waver-for-a-nanosecond agit-prop re-shaping and deliberate manipulation of the "truth."

The "picture of reality/presentation of news" provided by the "EIB" network reminds me of that old line from "Cheers," where in his most objective-sounding, serious-academic voice, after a suitably pregnant pause, Dr. Frasier Crane asked Cliff Klaven,

"...Cliff, ...what color is the sky in your world?"

(Maybe you had that in Parts I, II, or III, which I didn't see.)