{"id":5837,"date":"2011-05-02T12:54:45","date_gmt":"2011-05-02T12:54:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=5837"},"modified":"2011-05-02T19:39:44","modified_gmt":"2011-05-02T19:39:44","slug":"what-will-rush-say","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/what-will-rush-say\/","title":{"rendered":"What will Rush say?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>And Mark Levin and Sean Hannity.\u00a0 Their dilemma is acute:\u00a0 how acknowledge the accomplishment of their decade-long desideratum&#8211;the killing of Osama Bin Laden&#8211;without giving Obama credit?\u00a0 Arguably, Obama doesn&#8217;t deserve credit: he is the beneficiary of the continuous workings of the intelligence and military bureaucracy and just happened to be at the right place at the right time: at\u00a0\u00a0the country&#8217;s head when the opportunity to kill OBL finally presented itself.\u00a0 But the right-wing punditocracy has already in theory ruled out that position, having blamed the <em>Obama<\/em> intelligence community for having nearly missed the would-be underwear bomber, even though most of the relevant personnel responsible for that oversight undoubtedly were hold-overs from the Bush days.\u00a0\u00a0 So if Obama deserves the blame for failures of military intelligence, he should in theory deserve credit.\u00a0\u00a0 We&#8217;ll see.<\/p>\n<p>Rush update:<\/p>\n<p>Rush\u2019s strategy:\u00a0 ostentatiously, with unctuous noblesse oblige, give credit to Obama for maintaining Bush anti-terrorism policies which made\u2014per Limbaugh&#8211;the Osama assassination possible, while mocking the press for pumping up the momentousness of the event and mocking the Obama Administration for allegedly spinning the killing as an accomplishment of the Obama Administration (Rush: \u201cListen to him; it\u2019s all \u2018me, me, me\u2019\u201d).\u00a0\u00a0 In other words, the hall of mirrors quality of modern politics continues unabated.\u00a0 If Rush is right to ironize the media coverage and to detect in it a political agenda, is there any doubt that had Bush killed Osama, the right would be celebrating it as a Bush victory\u2014and assessing its effect on the next presidential election, something which Rush, in his new, \u201cI\u2019m above politics\u201d mode, now scorns?\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<br \/>\nLimbaugh has been reassuring his listeners that this event does not improve Obama\u2019s election chances\u2014probably rightly so.\u00a0 But his efforts to focus attention back on the economy are particularly amusing: \u201cIn fact, five and a half million Americans will lose their unemployment benefits this week.\u00a0 Five and a half million Americans shut out.\u201d\u00a0 This lachrymose dirge from a long-time opponent of extending unemployment insurance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>And Mark Levin and Sean Hannity.\u00a0 Their dilemma is acute:\u00a0 how acknowledge the accomplishment of their decade-long desideratum&#8211;the killing of Osama Bin Laden&#8211;without giving Obama credit?\u00a0 Arguably, Obama doesn&#8217;t deserve credit: he is the beneficiary of the continuous workings of &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/what-will-rush-say\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[343],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5837"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5837"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5837\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5840,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5837\/revisions\/5840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}