Conservative opinion-maker Rush Limbaugh talks like he knows everything about everything, but this week he really stepped in it.
Sensing a chance to attack President Barack Obama, the Republican talk show host defended the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and claimed that Obama had deployed a small number of troops to Africa to “wipe out Christians.”
A few moments later he was backpedaling, after someone informed him that he’d just stuck up for one of the most brutal militia movements in the world. LRA rebels are accused of terrorizing, murdering, raping and kidnapping thousands of people in the four nations, and tens of thousands of people died in their 20-year war with security forces in northern Uganda.
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“Is that right? The Lord’s Resistance Army is being accused of really bad stuff?” Limbaugh hesitantly inquired. “Child kidnapping, torture, murder, that kind of stuff? Well, we’ll find … We just found out about this today, and we’re gonna do, of course, our due diligence research on it.”
Thankfully, the world also has Stephen Colbert.
“Of course! of course!” Colbert replied during Wednesday night’s episode of The Colbert Report. “Due diligence always comes after accusing the president of killing Christians. That’s why it’s called re-search. If you do it before, it’s called pre-search.”
The linchpin for Limbaugh, it seems, is that the LRA’s ideology is based on a mystical perversion of Christianity, with many fighters believing they are guided by divine order to slaughter any opposition to their desired Christian theocracy. He claimed they were “fighting Muslims,” which would appear to be all that Limbaugh needed to know before pronouncing his judgment.
Obama announced earlier this week that he is sending 100 combat troops to central Africa to help and advise forces battling the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army. The mostly special operations forces could deploy in Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and Democratic Republic of the Congo, subject to approval of regional governments. They are not on a combat mission, officials said, and will only fight if attacked.
This video was broadcast by Comedy Central on Tuesday, Oct. 19, 2011.
