Rush Limbaugh Is Encouraging Violence?

08 May, 2008 by John Hawkins

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Over at the HuffPo, Jeffrey Feldman is actually accusing Rush Limbaugh of trying to incite violence with Operation Chaos,

For weeks, now, Rush Limbaugh has been trying to incite political violence by giving on-air military-sounding orders, effectively ‘commanding’ his listeners to wage war against the U.S. electoral system.

The right-wing pundit’s ‘orders’ to his Republican listeners have been clear: vote in the Democratic primaries as a coordinated tactic for sewing division in the opposition party. The goal of such ‘chaos,’ Limbaugh has stated explicitly, is to foment hatred between different parts of the Democratic Party leading, ultimately, to street riots during the Denver convention.

…Most Americans would agree that using radio to incite political violence is not only wrong, but the attempt itself represents a massive failure in our democracy. How Limbaugh’s broadcasts differ from, say, radio broadcasts that incited violence in Rwanda and Kenya, for example, can help us to understand exactly what Limbaugh was doing and the exact danger it poses.

…The violence in Limbaugh’s broadcasts, in other words, is not just the attempt to incite riots, but also a way of defining the Left as destructive murderers of children–as a violent threat to the American people.

In Rwanda, the radio broadcasts did not just invoke Hutu to kill Tutsi’s, but did so by claiming falsely that Tutsi’s had killed large numbers of Hutu and that, therefore, Hutu must form self-defense groups to prevent Tutsi from killing again. Defining Tutsi as murderers, in other words, was a crucial part of violent Hutu broadcasts that led to the genocide of Tutsi.

So, encouraging Republicans to vote with an eye towards extending the Democratic primary is the equivalent of Hutus encouraging other Hutus to go into the street and butcher Tutsis with machetes.

That’s an intriguing argument, especially given the sort of regular arguments that are made by liberals in these days and times. If you read liberal blogs and forums, you will regularly come across posts:

* Accusing conservatives of being Nazis.
* Accusing Bush of being worse than Hitler.
* Accusing Bush of going to war just to enrich his oil buddies.
* Accusing conservatives of being fascists.
* Accusing conservatives of wanting to round up liberals and put them in camps.
* Accusing conservatives of wanting to replace the government with a theocracy.
* Accusing Bush of being behind 9/11.
* Cheering the deaths of conservatives.

Now, ask yourself: would it be morally wrong to kill someone who’s “worse than Hitler?” How about killing the person behind the WTC attacks, Osama Bin Laden? Would you be morally OK with putting a gun to his head and shooting him? What if someone were going to round you up and take you to a death camp based on your political beliefs? Would it be immoral to murder him? Point being, standard liberal rhetoric that you hear every day would logically lead towards violence if they believed their own BS.

So, for Feldman to make this convoluted argument that Limbaugh is actually encouraging violence by encouraging conservatives to help keep the Democratic race going is amazingly hypocritical when you have liberals declaring that Bush is behind 9/11 and worse than Hitler every day.