If you are like me, you find yourself outraged at least once every couple weeks…ok maybe once a week…ok maybe more often than you wish at uninformed remarks made by public figures on issues you care about. Well, Rush Limbaugh’s comments last Friday takes the cake.
Apparently, Rush Limbaugh believes the brutal African militia – the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) – is doing God’s work. On his show last Friday, Limbaugh said:
Lord’s Resistance Army are Christians. They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan. And Obama has sent troops, United States troops to remove them from the battlefield, which means kill them. That’s what the lingo means, “to help regional forces remove from the battlefield,” meaning capture or kill.
Limbaugh was responding to the Obama Administration’s announcement last Friday that it was sending U.S. military advisors to Uganda to train troops to combat the LRA, which has brutally killed, abducted, tortured and enslaved tens of thousands of people in Uganda, the DR Congo and Sudan for more than two decades.
After criticizing President Obama for sending military advisors to help combat the threat posed by this brutal armed faction, Limbaugh went on to discuss their laundry list of stated objectives (eg. democracy, upholding human rights, restoration of peace in Uganda, economic prosperity…etc) as if to suggest that the LRA is actually fighting a legitimate campaign in Uganda. Indeed, the title of Limbaugh’s news segment, “Obama Invades Uganda, Targets Christians,” suggests he actually believes the U.S. is on the wrong side of the fight.
It’s one thing to dispute President Obama’s decision to send U.S. military advisors to Uganda for this mission. It’s quite another to actually think the LRA is a legitimate group which adheres to Christian values. To borrow a line from the West Wing’s President Bartlett, “Is it possible to be astonished and, yet at the same time, not surprised?”
