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Saturday, October 28, 2006

Who's really playing the victim card?
Posted by Jill | 6:50 AM
Rush Limbaugh's comments about Michael J. Fox aren't the first time he's accused Democrats of "playing the infallible victim card":

On the October 24 edition of his nationally syndicated radio program, Rush Limbaugh claimed that actor Michael J. Fox -- who has Parkinson's disease and appeared in a recent campaign ad for Missouri Democratic Senate candidate Claire McCaskill -- is part of "a script that they [Democrats] have written for years" in which "Senate Democrats used to parade victims of various diseases or social concerns or poverty up before congressional committees and let them testify and they were infallible." Limbaugh also compared Fox to "the Jersey Girls ... in the period of time when the 9-11 Commission was meeting publicly. Victims -- infallible, whatever they say cannot be challenged."


Might I remind Mr. Limbaugh of this? And this.

George W. Bush's entire presidency has been about playing the victim card. Almost 3000 Americans lost their lives on 9/11/01, and George Bush has been exploiting their "victimhood" ever since to justify all of the most heinous acts of his presidency. From starting an unjustified and unwarranted war in Iraq based on lies, to repealing the Magna Carta and setting us up as the Nation of Torture, to warrantless spying -- all of this has been done in the name of those who died in the 9/11 attacks.

Not a speech comes out of George W. Bush's mouth in which he does not invoke 9/11. Sometimes I think that if the contestant he liked most got voted off of Survivor, he'd say it was unjustified in view of the fact that we were hit on 9/11.

This entire country has been one huge victim card for George Bush for the last five years, especially those people who represent his base who were in no way affected by the attacks. These aren't the people who ride the subway every day and go to work in the skyscrapers. These aren't the people who go about their business because they have to even though, thanks to this president, the threat is not only still there but worse than ever before -- only next time, no one in the world will say "We are all Americans now."

What constitutes playing the victim card more than a president exploiting a tragedy to promote his own greedy, venal, destructive policies? Michael J. Fox just wants to live and to see his children grow up and be able to know his eventual grandchildren, just as we all do. If he's seizing on research that even MIGHT hold the keys to a cure, who the hell is Rush Limbaugh, or any of the right-wing gasbags, to say one god damn word about it, given their blind, slaving support to a president who has cynically used the deaths of people he didn't even know to dismantle an entire democracy.
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