Limbaugh Controversy Over "Real" SoldiersI'm a little late to this party, but there's still some punch in the bowl. The
Media Mutters crowd are trying to raise a stink over a Limbaugh comment on yesterday's show:
CALLER 2: No, it’s not, and what’s really funny is, they never talk to real soldiers. They like to pull these soldiers that come up out of the blue and talk to the media.
LIMBAUGH: The phony soldiers.
CALLER 2: The phony soldiers. If you talk to a real soldier, they are proud to serve. They want to be over in Iraq. They understand their sacrifice, and they’re willing to sacrifice for their country.
You can guess the take; "Rush is saying that if you don't support the war, you're a phony soldier."
Except that's not what he's saying. Read the exchange again, and see what Rush was responding to:
...they never talk to real soldiers.
(Italics added).
Well, if they're not talking to "real" soldiers, who are they talking to? Well, fake soldiers, and
Rush goes on to elucidate:
Here is a Morning Update that we did recently, talking about fake soldiers. This is a story of who the left props up as heroes. They have their celebrities and one of them was Army Ranger Jesse Macbeth. Now, he was a "corporal." I say in quotes. Twenty-three years old. What made Jesse Macbeth a hero to the anti-war crowd wasn't his Purple Heart; it wasn't his being affiliated with post-traumatic stress disorder from tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. No. What made Jesse Macbeth, Army Ranger, a hero to the left was his courage, in their view, off the battlefield, without regard to consequences. He told the world the abuses he had witnessed in Iraq, American soldiers killing unarmed civilians, hundreds of men, women, even children. In one gruesome account, translated into Arabic and spread widely across the Internet, Army Ranger Jesse Macbeth describes the horrors this way: "We would burn their bodies. We would hang their bodies from the rafters in the mosque."
So Rush even brings up an example of a phony soldier. But of course the Left isn't really interested in what Rush meant; this is just a convenient club for the folks who want to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine.
Rush was not criticizing soldiers who are against the war. He's criticizing phony soldiers who are against the war and the media who accept their claims uncritically.
Sadly,
a couple otherwise
sane people seem to agree with the cranks on this one.
Labels: Phony Soldiers, Rush Limbaugh
