WE PAY SO RUSH CAN LIE

As you may know, Rush Limbaugh is in Afghanistan, apparently on our dime. He called in to his show yesterday and did what he does best -- he grotesquely distorted the truth:

As you know we've had soldiers come back from both Afghanistan in Iraq and express frustration when they go home and watch the news and they see things that they don't see when they're actually deployed in these places, and these people have the same experience. Whenever they do see news out of Afghanistan -- when the UN came out today or yesterday saying that Afghanistan is losing ground; it's the fifth worst developed country in the world and unless there's a massive infusion then Afghanistan will descend back to the ravages of the Taliban. The Taliban is done. The Taliban is defeated. It has maybe 3,000 members. It's a phony report designed because the UN is trying to get their hands in the back pockets of the American taxpayer again by talking about Afghanistan not having enough development aid.

I'm assuming he's talking about the report that was discussed in yesterday's New York Times:

Three years after the United States drove the Taliban out of Afghanistan and vowed to rebuild, the war-shattered country ranked 173rd of 178 countries in the United Nations 2004 Human Development Index, according to a new report from the United Nations....

Despite the problems, Afghanistan has shown remarkable progress in the three years since the United States-led war in 2001, the report said.

More than 54 percent of school-age children are enrolled, including four million high school students. The economy is making great strides, with growth of 16 percent in nondrug gross domestic product in 2003 and predicted growth of 10 to 12 percent annually for the next decade.

While there has been rapid progress, said Zphirin Diabr, associate administrator of the United Nations Development Program, the country has a long way to go just to get back to where it was 20 years ago. The figures, as President Hamid Karzai says in the report's introduction, paint a gloomy picture....

Got that? It's such a "phony report" that Hamid Karzai agreed to write the introduction to it. And it doesn't say the country's getting worse -- it says the country's getting better.

Lying bastard.

Rush, for his part says, in the very same trancript,

Roger, I have to tell you this place is a hell hole. This country is as backwards as any one else I have ever been or ever seen...

And to the dittoheads, it's all true.

(Boldface emphasis mine throughout.)

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Incidentally, in the transcript the guest host calls Rush "the Doctor of Democracy." Twice.