Five months ago, Rush Limbaugh took go his radio program and continued his usual lies and misinformation about president Obama. On this particular occasion, Limbaugh blasted the president for sending 100 US Troops to Africa to search for Joseph Kony – the leader of a ruthless guerilla movement in Uganda, responsible for the kidnap and murder of hundreds of thousands of Africans.
The name of the group – Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) – and the fact that Obama was against them was enough for Limbaugh to make his decision on where he stood, and he chose Joseph Kony.
“Lord’s Resistance Army are Christians. They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan. And Obama has sent troops, United States troops to remove them from the battlefield, which means kill them,” Limbaugh said last Oct. 14, according to a show transcript.
Limbaugh then went on to read from what he said were the group’s self-described objectives, which included “to remove dictatorship and stop the oppression of our people.”
“Those are the objectives of the group that we are fighting,” said Limbaugh, implying that the US had taken the wrong side in the battle.
What Limbaugh did not say was that the list of LRA objectives appeared to have come straight off Wikipedia, according to a contemporaneous New York Times account. Nor did Limbaugh mention that for years the group had been widely accused of torture, murder, looting, and wanton destruction.
Perhaps the other major reason Limbaugh made this faux pas was that he was just talking too fast about stuff of which he knew little. Today over 50 million people have seen the Invisible Children video, which documents such LRA abuses as its kidnapping of children for use as soldiers. But Limbaugh’s discussion of the group occurred long before it became so well known.
In fact, as his broadcast progressed last October, Limbaugh obviously began receiving reports from listeners of the LRA’s real nature.
Near the end of the show he said, “Is that right? The Lord’s Resistance Army is being accused of really bad stuff? … Well, we just found out about this today. We’re gonna do, of course, our due diligence research on it. But nevertheless we got a hundred troops being sent over there to fight these guys – and they claim to be Christians.”
