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.”
