NOT EVEN THE WORST PART OF THAT LIMBAUGH SEGMENT

Rush Limbaugh's being criticized by Democrats for referring to "phony soldiers" in a radio discussion of people who are against the war. In response he's posted a transcript of the segment. It offers an interesting insight into life in Limbaugh Land.

In the transcript, we first read a dialogue between Limbaugh and a caller identified as Mike in Chicago. Mike says repeatedly that he's a Republican, but he's had it with the war:

CALLER: Well, I am a Republican, and I listened to you for a long time, and you're right on a lot of things, but I do believe that we should pull out of Iraq. I don't think it's winnable. I'm not a Democrat, but sometimes you gotta cut the losses. I mean, sometimes you really got to admit you're wrong.

Limbaugh can't stand it. He's beside himself. And as the call goes on, there's this exchange:

CALLER: I used to be military, okay, and I am a Republican.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: And I do listen to you, but --

RUSH: Right, I know. And I, by the way, used to walk on the moon.

So he's calling Mike in Chicago a liar. Apparently, it's not possible to be a Republican and against the war (tell that to these people), or ex-military and against the war.

The next caller is another Mike -- this one from Olympia, Washington. He's a Dittohead, and he and Limbaugh are in a mutual admiration society. It's with this Mike that we get the exchange we've all read about:

CALLER: I'm one of the few that joined the Army to serve my country, I'm proud to say, not for the money or anything like that. What I would like to retort to is that, what these people don't understand, is if we pull out of Iraq right now, which is not possible because of all the stuff that's over there, it would take us at least a year to pull everything back out of Iraq, then Iraq itself would collapse and we'd have to go right back over there within a year or so.

RUSH: There's a lot more than that that they don't understand. The next guy that calls here I'm going to ask them, "What is the imperative of pulling out? What's in it for the United States to pull out?" I don't think they have an answer for that other than, "When's he going to bring the troops home? Keep the troops safe," whatever.

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: It's not possible intellectually to follow these people.

CALLER: No, it's not. And what's really funny is they never talk to real soldiers. They pull these soldiers that come up out of the blue and spout to the media.

RUSH: The phony soldiers.

CALLER: Phony soldiers. If you talk to any real soldier and they're proud to serve, they want to be over in Iraq, they understand their sacrifice and they're willing to sacrifice for the country.

RUSH: They joined to be in Iraq.

The two of them are thinking about Jesse Macbeth, who claimed to have participated in war crimes and who truly was a phony soldier -- he said he'd been an Army Ranger, but he was discharged from the military before completing basic training. A case can be made (in fact, it's being made right now) that Limbaugh and the caller meant only that we lefties never talk to real veterans, only phonies like Macbeth. This is stupid (and who exactly are the other phonies?), but perhaps it's not exactly the same as calling all war critics who've fought "phony." It's certainly not as direct as what Limbaugh said to the previous Mike -- he called him a phony flat out.

Later in the transcript, Limbaugh will talk at some length about Macbeth -- but we're not done with Mike #2, who's just getting wound up. You want a cockamamie story? He's got one:

CALLER: ... My other comment, my original comment, was a retort to Jill about the fact we didn't find any weapons of mass destruction. Actually, we have found weapons of mass destruction in chemical agents that terrorists have been using against us for a while now. I've done two tours in Iraq, I just got back in June, and there are many instances of insurgents not knowing what they're using in their IEDs. They're using mustard artillery rounds, VX artillery rounds in their IEDs. Because they didn't know what they were using, they didn't do it right, and so it didn't really hurt anybody. But those munitions are over there. It's a huge desert. If they bury it somewhere, we're never going to find it.

You follow that? The insurgents have found the WMDs! They're using them! Many insurgent attacks are WMD attacks! And our soldiers know it! But -- even though this would be an incredible propaganda coup for the Bush administration -- nobody is reporting it!

That's utterly nuts.

So what does Rush say? Does he tell the caller he's nuts?

Nope. Here's what he says:

RUSH: Well, that's a moot point for me right now.

That's it. Then he continues:

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: The weapons of mass destruction. We gotta get beyond that. We're there. We all know they were there, and Mahmoud [Ahmadinejad] even admitted it in one of his speeches here talking about Saddam using the poison mustard gas or whatever it is on his own people. But that's moot.

Catch that last part? We said Saddam didn't have WMDs in 2003, and the rebuttal to that is ... the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988). As Tom Hilton recently said in response to a lesser light of the wingnuttosphere who made a similar argument, Limbaugh

is still having trouble with that whole 'linear time' concept, believing (apparently) that all events are simultaneous.

And this is just another day at the office for Rush Limbaugh. This is the kind of swamp gas he's pumping into the atmosphere.