Victim blaming 101
by digby
If you ever wonder where right wingers get their Pee Wee Hermanesque arguments, look no further than this guy:
RUSH LIMBAUGH: I know, I know, the staff is all worried now because they think I’m going to get roasted here for blaming the victim with my simple innocent question: why doesn’t Planned Parenthood get blamed? Before you go off the deep end on that may I remind you a couple things.
After 9/11 what was one of the most frequent questions you heard in the drive-by media? I’ll tell you what it was. What did we do to make them so mad that they felt they had to do this to us? Do you remember the State Department convened a — I don’t know what — a forum, a panel, some such thing — they had a bunch of experts to come in to examine what it is we had done to make the hijackers on 9/11 so mad. In other words the left in this country immediately sought to assign blame to the United States for the terror attack on 9/11. And they did not hesitate to do this.
It didn’t take until the next day for this question to start reverberating all over the country. What did we do to cause it? So I’m simply trying to learn the way the left thinks about these things and incorporate it here into the way I do my program. Barack Obama blames this country for stuff that happens here and he runs around world and apologizes for it. OK, so if Planned Parenthood had this incident and the shooter starts running around talking about no more body parts, who is it that’s dealing in body parts? If the left were being consistent they would ask themselves what have we done to make people so mad at us?
This is too cute by half even for that smug piece of work.
“The left” didn’t seek explanations about why Al Qaeda attacked us on 9/11, “America” did. And while I’m sure there were some people who thought the US rather than al Qaeda was responsible for the 3,000 dead, the only one I can think of who made that case openly was a professor named Ward Churchill whose career was destroyed because of it. It certainly was not a mainstream view held by famous celebrities with millions of followers.
Ironically, in this case the right spent days desperately hoping that the terrorist had no anti-abortion motive and have gone to great lengths trying to excuse what he did as the actions of a madman having nothing to do with their incitement. Unsurprisingly, he turned out to be an anti-abortion fanatic.
Rush’s “I know you are but what am I” logic may convince his followers that there is some merit in this ridiculous argument but there isn’t. “The left” didn’t “blame America” for 9/11 and insist that the US government capitulate to terrorists demands. That never happened. But that is what Rush is saying Planned Parenthood should do. That makes him a terrorist sympathizer. But we knew that.
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