JOho today answers one of Rush Limbaugh’s totally “dittohead” arguments. I never read the idiot (I found references to this elsewhere), because that’s all he is. You KNOW that Rush’s fame comes from his ability to come up with arguments to bash the democrats on absolutely anything. Now he’s at it over the Iraqi prisoner abuse.

Will this bring a break between Bush and the DittoHead wing of the Republican Party? Rush is telling his cadre that this was all caused by some “idiot” who took “a picture of something out of context.” “The world is laughing” at us for the Senate’s questioning of Rumsfeld:

Um, 25 Iraqis. And America’s claim to being the unambiguous moral leader of the world.

Yeah, Rush, 25 Iraqis, as if you cared a lick. It’s all about “us” and U.S. with you. Sadly, this is the approach that many in the Christian Right have.

This is the danger of demonization. The “enemy” becomes something less than human, expendable in “God’s plan”. There are doubtless many in the Christian Right who would not hjold this view, but nevertheless jump to defend the administration becuase they accept wholesale the administration’s justifications for their actions, simply becasue their “Christian leadership” is out on the forefront, being apologists for this “Christian president”, simply because he said “Christ changed my heart”, but even before that, simply because he was a Republican, and God knows, everybody knows, that “God has to be a Republican”.

Totally absent is any hint of a larger ethic that reaches beyond Nationalistic Americanism; glorification of “our way of life”, and a “way of life” that Bush raises up to the level of deity by his misuse of Biblical passages to describe the American people (like using “the light Shines in the darkness” as referring to the Amercan people (as seen and heard —from Bush’s own mouth — on the “The Jesus factor” last week on PBS.

It’s diheartening to me to see how many “Christian” people actually use some of Rush’s arguments. When Rush actually used his show to say that Chelsea Clinton was “a dog’ (this when Chelse was about 12 years old) , I stopped listening altogehter. But I have run across his show when scanning the dial from time to time. He exists on the air for that purpose and that purpose only: to continue to come up with the ammunition for the dittoheads. Even in the face of the most obvious abuses, and say that they are “overblown”, and to divert attention away from any hint of actual suffering by those outside this “good ol’ USA”.

Who died, Rush? It’s one of the jobs of Christians whose ethics actually extend outside of the “American world” to stand up for the “victims” who are being forgotten…..those people who are otherwise seen as “collateral damage” (The “American world” to which I refer is a picture painted by the Right Wing in this country who see nothing wrong with preemptive strikes, decisions based on non-existent evidence, and massive rollbacks of years of efforts to slow global environmental abuses by large corporations, the list can go on and on).

Rush, your question “Who died” is one of the Anti-Christ. It’s one which places the emphasis on “how does this affect ME”…..not the others who suffer under this MRE approach.