The major news media
no longer have the monopoly they once enjoyed. The way millions of
Americans get their news and news analysis is through talk radio. The
Rush Limbaugh Show stands at the very top of talk radio, carried on
more than 650 radio stations and listened to by an estimated 20
million people each week. As an occasional fill-in for Rush, and being
a professor, I see the show as being my big classroom, but I learn a
lot as well.
Over the span of some
20 years, Rush has been attacked from just about every leftist corner,
as would anyone who tirelessly espoused the founding principles of our
nation -- private property, rule of law and limited government. What
has made Rush so effective with this message has been his ability to
put things, and ask questions, in a manner that the average citizen
can understand and relate to, and do so with a bit of humor. Humor
creates madness among leftists who want their interventionist agenda
taken seriously.
Rush's show, as well
as many of his competitors' shows, has ended much of the isolation
among Americans. For example, if you were against racial quotas, you
were made to feel like a racist by the major media. With the growth of
talk radio, people found out that they were not alone and that being
against racial quotas didn't make one a racist. As such, talk radio
has been a painful thorn in the sides of those whose agenda is to
control the news and debate as a means to control our lives. This is
why the priority agenda for leftists is to attack talk radio, and
their biggest target is Rush Limbaugh.
The latest attack
from the left alleges that Rush referred to our fighting men, who
disagreed with our Middle East policy, as "phony soldiers."
The truth of the matter is that Rush was referring to people like
Jesse Macbeth, who became the poster boy for the anti-war and
anti-military movement. Macbeth passed himself off as an Army Ranger
and a Purple Heart recipient. He said he participated in gruesome war
crimes with other U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. An
investigation proved that none of his claims was true; he wasn't an
Army Ranger or a Purple Heart recipient, and he didn't serve in Iraq
and Afghanistan. In fact, he was kicked out of the Army after 44 days
of boot camp.
Last September,
Macbeth was sentenced to five months in jail and three years'
probation for falsifying a Department of Veterans Affairs claim and
his Army discharge record. Macbeth, idolized by the anti-war movement,
is truly a despicable person. On a video translated into Arabic, for
Middle East consumption, he said, "We would burn their bodies . .
. hang their bodies from the rafters in the mosque."
False
misrepresentation of oneself as a soldier has become so widespread
that Congress enacted the Stolen Valor Act of 2005 to prosecute people
posing as veterans. In fact, a Sept. 29 ABC News report by Charles
Gibson did an expose on people such as Macbeth, and they were called
"phony war heroes."
The members of
Congress who are attacking Limbaugh know all of this, but they're
trusting that the average American doesn't so they can pull the
rope-a-dope. By attacking Limbaugh, they hope to breathe some life
into the Fairness Doctrine, which was repealed by a unanimous vote by
the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1987. The doctrine,
said the FCC, "restricts the journalistic freedom of broadcasters
and actually inhibits the presentation of controversial issues of
public importance to the detriment of the public and the degradation
of the editorial prerogative of broadcast journalists."
Sen.
Harry Reid, D-Nev., is leading the charge in misrepresenting
Limbaugh's phony soldier comment. In a few weeks, I shall have a
column about phony congressmen and Harry Reid, and about 500 of his
colleagues are among them.
Dr. Williams
serves on the faculty of George Mason University as John M. Olin
Distinguished Professor of Economics and is the author of More
Liberty Means Less Government: Our Founders Knew This Well.
