Limbaugh’s ‘Big Lie’ Technique

April 27th, 2013

Peter Nolan

Recently
by Thomas DiLorenzo: Chicago
School ‘Market Socialism’

Rush Limbugh
recently threw a fit on his radio show over an appearance by Michael
Sheuer on the FOX News Channel (as did Sean Hannity, who was even
more apoplectic than Limbaugh). Michael Sheuer is the former CIA
head of the bin Laden unit. Limbaugh was at his sarcastic and bombastic
name-calling worst in responding to Sheuer’s comments.

What on earth
did Michael Sheuer say to cause such an emotional explosion of bombast?,
one might ask. Well, when asked by the host of a FOX News show about
what might motivate Muslims from the Middle East to harm Americans,
the man the CIA put in charge of the “bin Laden unit”
said, “People don’t like being invaded or bombed,” and
they sometimes retaliate. This of course is perfectly reasonable
and understandable. It’s called “blowback.” He reminded
the FOX host that Muslims have long protested the American military
presence in the Muslim country of Saudi Arabia; the invasion and
occupation of Iraq; the killing of thousands of Iraqi civilians;
the statement by U.N. Ambasador Albright that a half million dead
Iraqi children was “a price we are willing to pay”
to achieve our political objectives; the U.S. government’s support
for the government of Israel in its wars against Muslims; and the
bombing and killing of civilians in numerous other Muslim countries,
most recently in Mali and Libya under the Obama regime.

“We are
trying to impose democracy . . . and parliamentary government .
.. on a people who don’t want it,” said Sheuer. All of this
is perfectly true, which is why Limbaugh did not spend one second
of air time disputing anything that Michael Sheuer actually said.
He did not because he could not. Instead, Limbaugh attacked a straw
man by reinterpreting Sheuer’s words to supposedly mean that “Islam
has nothing to do with it” and “It’s the United States’
fault!!!!!!”

Scheuer never
said “Islam has nothing to do with it.” Limbaugh said
that. What Sheuer has said is that many Muslims resent the never-ending
attempts by the U.S. government to impose our culture of “democracy”
on them at gunpoint and at the cost of thousands of Muslim lives.
Limbaugh was never a CIA agent like Scheuer, but one might think
of him alternatively as an FIB agent of the state.

Limbaugh was
even more misleading when he screeched and whined over and over
that Scheuer supposedly said that “It’s the United States’
fault!” “It’s America’s fault!” No, Rush, it’s not
“America’s” fault. It is the fault of the several dozen
or so political connivers, liars, manipulators and empire builders
who call themselves “statesmen.” The average American
never has anything whatsoever to do with the “diplomacy”
that gets us into never-ending, perpetual wars for perpetual peace.
As Randolph Bourne wrote in his famous essay, “War is the Health
of the State,” [A]ll foreign policy, the diplomatic negotiations
which produce or forestall war, are . . . the private property of
the Executive part of the Government, and are equally exposed to
no check whatever from popular bodies, or the people voting as a
mass themselves.”

It is not “America”
that is responsible for the killing of hundreds or thousands of
Muslim civilians with drone strikes or other weapons of mass
destruction. War always originates, wrote Bourne, when “the
government, with no mandate from the people, without consultation
of the people, conducts all the negotiations, the backing and filling,
the menaces and explanations, which slowly bring it into collision
with some other government, and gently and irresistibly slides the
country into war” (emphasis added). Contrary to what Limbaugh
insinuates and what Barack Obama has similarly declared, the government
is not us. The government is the government; it is the largest
instrument of organized plunder ever known to man. We are
the plundered, duped, and misled into catastrophic, bankrupting
war after war that has nothing to do with “national defense.”

What really
set Limbaugh off was Michael Scheuer’s mockery of the standard neocon
line that “they hate us because of our freedoms.” Muslims
are not motivated to harm Americans because “you and I can
have a beer after work,” Sheuer said to the FOX host. He called
this theory “insane,” and he was right.

Those who
really hate our freedoms are those who supported the PATRIOT
Act, the National Defense Authorization Act, warrantless wiretapping,
internet eavesdropping, and the creation of what William F. Buckley
approvingly described as a “totalitarian bureaucracy within
our shores” with a gigantic FBI and CIA complex, a massive
military, and the militarization of society into a police state.
(Buckley – Limbaugh’s hero of heroes – once said that all of that
was necessary in his day to fight the Cold War). Rush Limbaugh would
be at the top of the list of supporters of such a freedom-destroying
regime.

Randolph Bourne
would be even more cynical about war had he lived to witness the
gargantuan army of squawking chickenhawks on TV and talk radio,
led by the likes of Limbaugh and Hannity, whose cheerleading for
war is many orders of magnitude greater that that produced by the
chickenhawk journalists of Bourne’s day (the World War I era). The
role of today’s squawking chickenhawks is to serve as the propaganda
megaphones of the warfare state and the military-industrial complex.
In return, they are paid eye-popping salaries for their mediocre
talents and turned into “celebrities” of a sort. Their
job is to make sure that the nightmarish reality of the warfare
state as described by Randolph
Bourne becomes or remains a reality. With the onset of war, said
Bourne, “the patriot loses all sense of the distinction between
state, nation, and government” and “the individual becomes
almost identical with his society.” This of course is what
the Limbaughs of the world want when they falsely accuse people
like Michael Sheuer of saying “America” is at fault for
terrorist attacks.

With war, “minority
opinion” becomes “a case for outlawry,” and at times
“the minorities are either intimidated into silence, or brought
around slowly by a subtle process of persuasion . . . ” That
again is the job of the squawking chickenhawks. They are in reality
a part of “the whole terrific force of the state” which
is “brought to bear against heretics,” a.k.a., the proponents
of peace and prosperity as opposed to war and impoverishment of
the masses.

As soon as
Barack Obama took office Limbaugh, Hannity, Levin, and the rest
of the squawking chickenhawks totally reversed their personas. During
the Bush regime they sounded like Benito Mussolini in their denunciations
of the Constitution in the name of “safety.” “9/11
changed everything” was their mantra. Translation: To hell
with the Constitution. Liberty Schmiberty. But with a Democrat in
office they began sounding more like Thomas Jefferson, even writing
books about liberty and freedom for a change. But their true personalities
are revealed whenever a genuine Jeffersonian like Ron Paul, or a
genuine advocate of American peace and prosperity like Michael Sheuer
becomes prominent. In such instances the claws come out, the microphones
are turned up, and they reveal their true selves as the propaganda
mouthpieces for the state, which Randolph Bourne described as representing
“all the autocratic, arbitrary, coercive, belligerent forces
within a social group,” a “sort of complexus of everything
most distasteful to the modern creative free spirit, the feeling
for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. War is the health
of the State.”