This is one of those rare moments when we are compelled to thank Rush Limbaugh for settling an argument that liberals have been making for years. Specifically, that Bush has escaped accountability for gross malfeasance in office. Of course, Limbaugh doesn’t know what his remarks portend and would deny it he were told, but we’ll take what we can get. If Obama is guilty of political mischief, Bush’s guilt is of a far more deadly variety.
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On yesterday’s radio broadcast, Limbaugh went full-on Godwin as he tried (for the umpteenth time) to compare the Obama administration to Hitler’s Nazi regime. This time he inserted a brief disclaimer stating that he wasn’t saying Obama was Hitler, then went on to finish his lecture about how Obama is so much like Hitler. The inspiration for this rant came from a former Reagan national security adviser, Herbert Meyer, whom Limbaugh cited as his source for this extended bit of nonsense:
“[W]hether you believe it or not, there is not one document linking Adolf Hitler to the holocaust. Adolf Hitler never put it on paper what he intended to do. There is no smoking gun. And yet what happened? We know that the Nazis engaged in the Holocaust. Herb Meyer’s point was that the people Hitler hired didn’t have to be told. They didn’t have to be given instructions. All they had to do was listen to what Hitler was saying. All they had to do was listen to what his objectives were. And he said the same thing’s happening here with this administration.”
See? Exactly the same thing is happening now as happened with Hitler (minus the millions of corpses). Obama is deploying coded messages to his minions who will carry out the secret assignments that all two million federal employees know via telepathic transmission and, of course, the ObamaPhone.
The problem with this conspiracy blathering is that the central premise is utterly false. There were numerous documented links between Hitler and the tactics used by his regime to exterminate millions of people. The Wannsee Protocols and the doctrine of the “Final Solution” were explicit instructions to engage in mass murder. The Nuremberg Trials also made public documentary evidence of Hitler’s direct participation in the Holocaust. So right off the bat Limbaugh is revealing nothing other than his own ignorance of history, as well as his gross insensitivity to the victims of the Nazi horrors.
More to the point, the notion that Obama is somehow responsible for what has occurred at the IRS because his agenda was being carried out by underlings who just absorbed his intentions through intuition, is ludicrous. Furthermore, Rush’s twisted logic has repercussions that he may not have considered. During the Bush administration there was an abundance of initiatives that were carried out by people under his authority that were unambiguously illegal. U.S. attorneys were fired for their political affiliations. Covert CIA agents were outed in the press. Lies were used to justify military invasions of countries with whom we were not at war. Prisoners of war were tortured in violation of the Geneva Conventions.
At the time, there were no documentary links definitively tying Bush to these activities. There were also no investigations conducted to ascertain the facts. But by Limbaugh’s reasoning, none of that is necessary. Bush is obviously guilty because the perpetrators worked for him and thus were aware of his unspoken approval for what they did. And since some of those actions are war crimes, then according to Limbaugh, Bush should go on trial ala Nuremberg.
Where once there was a requirement that a “smoking gun” be found to seal the guilt of a criminal defendant, Limbaugh has literally said that such evidence is no longer needed. But the lunacy of his legal ramblings went even further:
“You don’t need to link Obama to it. He hired these people. Lois Lerner and everybody at the IRS who’s doing this is doing everything they can to please Obama.”
Limbaugh might have a point except for the fact that Lois Lerner and IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman are both Republicans who were hired by George Bush. There has not been a single person affiliated with this so-called scandal who has been identified as a Democrat or was hired by a Democratic political appointee. The IRS line workers are either career employees or were hired by the GOP managers at the tax-exempt organizations division (i.e. Lerner).
So if Limbaugh wants to blame everything that happens at the IRS (or the DoJ, or the State Department, or Benghazi, or Sandy Hook, or the JFK assassination) on Obama, then I say we send Bush to the Hague. What do you say, Rush?
