A Big, Fat Target
OK, I know, the “big fat” jokes concerning Rush Limbaugh are wearing thin. But he has so clearly crossed over the line from being a pompous, extremist windbag to being a complete joke that it’s hard not to take easy pot shots at him. I really, truly have to wonder at the character of any human being that accepts anything he says. Here is his latest on the Middle East:
Let’s just have the civil wars and let the crumbs crumble and the cookie crumble where — because I’m fed up with this. The Palestinian situation — for 50 years we’ve had the Palestinian situation, and it’s not going to be solved until the Limbaugh Doctrine is imposed or tried. And that is, this is a war, and until somebody loses it, it isn’t going to stop. And now, you know, we’ve done everything we can to make Lebanon a democracy, and it’s crumbling because Syria keeps killing the popular leaders there. Meanwhile, the Hezbos [Hezbollah] keep expanding their influence in Lebanon.But what the hell! We’re going to bring Syria and Iran in to fix Iraq, why not let them just fix the whole region? If we’re heading to civil war — I mean, everybody comes to us: “You got to fix this and you got to fix that.” So we go and try to fix it, and our own people, Democrats and the left in our country do their best to sabotage our efforts, and then we get blamed for trying to clean up the messes that these people start. And then they come on our television show: “[Gibberish] George [gibberish] civil war [gibberish] we gotta do something. Palestinians it’s a must, it’s a must, we must [gibberish] right now [gibberish] war.”
Fine, just blow the place up. Just let these natural forces take place over there instead of trying to stop them, instead of trying to use — I just — sometimes natural force is going to happen. You’re going to have to let it take place. You can spend all the time you like with diplomacy, and you can spend all the time you want massaging these things with diplomatic — you’re just — you’re just delaying the inevitable.
I love that middle part, where he says that all the messes in the Middle East are the fault of Democrats and liberals, and that right-wingers get blamed for trying to clean up after them. Because Republicans over the past five years have done so much for peace in the Middle East. And Democrats and liberals, despite having no power over that time, somehow got in and sabotaged all they had accomplished! And now we’re blaming the Republicans for all that stuff which is so clearly the Democrats’ fault! Boo hoo!
Of course, the key statement in this tirade is the “Limbaugh Doctrine”: Just blow the place up. That ought to solve all their problems.
The point about violence in the middle east is simply to spare lives and livelihoods, by simply trying to kick the can down the road far enough and long enough that a new paradigm emerges that rises above the strife.
Witness Europe and its 1500 years of near constant warfare following the fall of the Roman Empire. In the 17th century there were only three years of official peace in Europe. But avoiding war, allows for growth in education and economic development and in general, empowerment, and eventually that leads people to the place where Europe is now, which is to see the futility of perpetual conflict and the benefits of cooperation.
Life and love, and living and loving and the paradigm of personal growth, either yours or someone else’s, is the point of human existence. Stability is the means to doing this in a good fashion. By Limbaugh’s measure, if we just kill everyone in the world, but him and his Dominican prostitutes and drug suppliers, the world would be immensely stable place. So the real problem is everyone else in the world who is either not him, not one of his prostitutes or one of his drug suppliers.
From a certain standpoint he is right, of course. But it seems a little harsh to kill everyone to gain that kind of stability. Where’s the love, where’s the growth, where’s the life… in his case its all between his knees and his cranium.