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Why Does the U.S. Get All the Tornadoes?
Posted By Blake Hounshell
Saturday, October 15, 2011 - 12:52 PM
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Yesterday, when President Obama announced that the United States would be sending 100 special operations forces to help Uganda battle the Lord's Resistance Army, a notorious and brutal death cult led by Joseph Kony, a joke went around on Twitter that Michele Bachmann would soon be attacking the president for "targeting Christians."
Of course, to call the LRA "Christians" is to abase the English language. As the Atlantic's Graeme Wood put it in a profile of Kony last year, "An American diplomat in Bangui compared the group to the Manson family, but given that the LRA has killed 12,000 people, the comparison is self-evidently unfair to Manson."
Human Rights Watch's Ken Roth wrote of the group last fall:
Its cadre often descends on a remote village, slaughters every adult in sight, and then kidnaps the children, some shockingly young -- the boys to become soldiers slinging AK-47s, the girls to serve as "bush wives." Over more than two decades, many thousands have fallen victim to these roving mass murderers.
But Bachmann was too smart to fall into this trap, and instead it was Rush Limbaugh who jumped on the news to attack Obama. Behold:
Lord's Resistance Army are Christians. They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan. ... 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. ...
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.
Then, after a break, he (sort of) realizes his mistake:
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.
It takes your breath away, doesn't it?
(Thanks to @AdamSerwer for the link.)
TUGELA RIDLEY/AFP/Getty Images
to call the LRA "Christians" is to abase the English language.
Not at all. Scan some history books and you'll see that the LRA is nothing new in the history of Christianity.
I should add that a "no true Scotsman" fallacy is just that - a fallacy.
when the wantonly violent are involved. The urbane Mr. Charles Taylor was a pre-trial devout Muslim.
Q. So he's now a practicing Jew?
A. He's now a Jew. He's practicing Judaism.
Q. Tells us about that? What led him to that?
A. Because of the difficulties, he always wanted to know God in a very different and special way. From a very small boy -- because we talk about his childhood a whole lot -- he asked himself questions about Christianity. Too many questions about why certain things happened. And why, this one and that one. Just too many question in Christianity and the whole thing about Christ because he does believe in Christ. When he got to the Hague, he got to know that he really, really wanted to be a Jew. Wanted to convert to Judaism. And that...
Q. Does that mean he has rejected Christianity then? Because that's quite a radical departure.
A. No, no, no he hasn't rejected Christianity. He has always been a Christian. He just decided to become a Jew. He wants to follow the two religions.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/2009/06/090602_mrs_taylor.shtml
Rush, you are an IDIOT!
Yeah, get your "news" from Rush and get your "medical care" from Michael Jackson's personal physician and get your "spiritual leadership" from Reverend Phelps and and get your "political leadership" from Palin and Bachman -- won't that make the USA a great place to live?
how do these near mentally defective, air gobbling bags of excrement EVER find air time? There should be a serious academic test for anyone attempting to become a pundit...I bet a good portion of listeners only heard the first part of Rush's diatribe there, and now we have a group of already crazy people believing that Obama is massacring Christians in Africa. just...unbelievable how stupid we are as a country sometimes...
Do you mean Rush was opining on a topic he knows absolutely nothing about again? Business as usual if you ask me, just this time the group he defends is internationally recognized as one of the most repugnant and evil on earth. Why this man is allowed to continue espousing this sort of drivel is beyond me, but I guess if you have a legion of like-minded idiots that hang on your every word then it is possible for the likes of Rush to not only survive but do exceptionally well. The times we live in..
Is he hitting up the maid for Oxys again?
Sigh.
When I learned of Mr. Limbaugh's defense of the LRA, I was tempted to chalk up yet one more boorish display of sheer ignorance by King Ignoramus Hisself. But there is simply no way that Limbaugh could really misread the LRA's long history of almost unbelieveable atrocities because there is an "L" in "LRA". Mr. Limbaugh's astonishingly cynical support of the LRA is merely an underhanded dig at both President Obama and Muslims, whom Limbaugh hates with enough bigotry that he would defend machete-wielding mass rapists who use drug-addicted child soldiers to carry out their genocidal rage. What's so frightening is that his legions of "dittoheads" will investigate the LRA no further than their "fearless leader's" pretend fact-checking in the name of hatred for our President and Limbaugh's apathetic "Crusade" against all things Islamic. This is so, so reprehensible it boggles the mind.
Quite frankly, Limbaugh's comments are quite illustrative of the way most of the right has responded to Obama's presidency: with a reflexive opposition to EVERYTHING Obama does, no matter the merits.
Limbaugh calling Lord's Army Christians didn't really lie but he was deliberately misleading a gullible audience. Who are the "patriotic owners" of radio stations that permit him to use their microphones and give him air time to mis-educate their listeners?
...since he probably would not be losing much listenership anyways. One of my professors once made jokingly referred to the conservatives as people "who can't read and can't write." Well, he's not too far from the truth, anyways.
You should not soil your fine website
By having anything said by Rush Limbaugh in it. Limbaugh hates Obama with a passion and wants to see him defeated. The only time Limbaugh should ever be mentioned here is if he's in jail.
Hasn't he lost all credibility by now?
Unfortunately Rush will do or say anything to undermine Obama and to slander those who don't agree with his twisted hateful logic. Too bad anyone listens to him at all and to bad that they tend to believe his hate-spewing, ranting propaganda. download free movies
Mr. Limbaugh's astonishingly cynical support of the LRA is merely an underhanded dig at both President Obama and Muslims, whom Limbaugh hates with enough bigotry that he would defend machete-wielding mass rapists parents guide who use drug-addicted child soldiers to carry out their genocidal rage.
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