Rumbaughditty

Relief Suffuses World Views of U.S. Vote

excerpt from this Washington Post article:"Rumsfeld never had many friends in Europe," Marcin Zaborowski, who monitors transatlantic relations for the Paris-based European Union Institute for Security Studies, said in an interview. "He exemplified anything that was bad about this administration. He personified the approaches Europeans had the most problems with -- going to war in Iraq on the false premises that it was closely linked to the war on terrorism and directly linked to the events of 9/11."

Today (Friday) I did something out of my ordinary. I listened to right wing radio. Last time I did this was about 4 years ago. Not much about it has changed over that period. I won't be listening in again anytime soon.

I listened to Rumsfeld's speech at Kansas State on November 9, the day after he resigned or rather was dismissed. He was well miked so you could hear him sniffling every minute or so. I suspect he had a cold but it came across as crying.

He said nothing about the neocons, nothing about the run up to the war, nothing about the occupation and the non-existent plan to do so. He spoke about the need to allow democracy to flourish, overcome tyrants, and to know history well. I got confused for a long stretch because I pressumed he was talking about America. But no, this was a projection of monumental proportion. I suspect that it must be hard to "get the bigger picture," when one thinks they are the bigger picture.

Limbaugh was in rare form. Changing the context of miniscule and remotely unimportant news flashes is his specialty. He makes a mountain out of a mole hill. However the mountain is always the demon of liberalism or the democrat and his "democrat" party. His call ins like to mimic him and the term "eye-rack" (Iraq) is prevalent.

Today Limbaugh went after senior citizens. He was blaming them for voting for the "democrat" party. He of course was misinformed. Results show that seniors trended towards Republicans, so I was not getting the gist of his tirade. Then he went after usual suspects Rangel and Kerry. blah blah. What we did not hear was any acknowledgment whatsoever of the degree of corruption and insidious treasonous behavior of the Republicans over the last 6 years.

Addendum 2: It occurs to me that one of Limbaughs specialties is to create a bitter violent hatred moment. The object here is to rev up a violent physical response from the ditto heads. Within 10 minutes of my turning on the program this occurred with a caller wanting to break Rangel's jaw and keep his mouth shut for a few weeks. Hey they don't call it hate radio for nothing. Limbaugh pushes this hate button, that's his job.

Addendum: Over the last 6 years, right wing pundits like Limbaugh, Hannity, and Coulter tried their very best to limit dissent. These people continuously said that not agreeing with Bush was next to treason. This amounted to a deliberate attempt to suppress freedom of speech and thought in this country. The idea was to sow fear into the left, people like me. Guess what, it failed big time. Could we ever expect some sort of retribution for this foul and disgusting tactic? Let's hope so. Time to take out the garbage.

Hannity was brazen. He allowed "liberals" to call in and gloat. What it amounted to was some young rather inexperienced sound bite replicator fumbling to say something of meaning while Hannity called them "another dumb liberal." This is apparently informed radio conversation.

Hannity also forgot about Republican corruption of the Abramoff, Foley, Haggard, DeLay, Cunningham, Ney, etc etc etc degree. And we liberals have long memories and never let anything go, except of course its OK with Clinton who can still be blamed for everything bad about Bush by the wingnuts. He forgot about going to war based on a deliberate sequence of lies to the American people. This for some reason does not seem to matter to the extremists. Lying apparently is OK especially if you do it. And he forgot about illegal wiretapping which Hannity refers to as a terrorist surveillance program, conveniently omitting that it is illegal. The key word here is "illegal."

Don't bother with these guys. Its a waste of time. Its not even amusing, its nauseating. I suppose something can be said for someone who can run his mouth endlessly, kudos. On the other hand, the people that listen to this and see it as a learning session, yikes. Its like Fox News, you would be more informed if you listened to nothing than if you listened to these guys.