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Monday, October 15, 2007

Oh, fer cryin' out loud - Monday edition
Posted by Jill | 5:20 AM
It seems that Rush Limbaugh arranged to have himself nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize this year and now he's having a tantrum because Al Gore won:

For starters, it appears that Limbaugh de facto nominated himself. The nomination went out under the letterhead of “his lawyers” at the Landmark foundation, a rightwing nonprofit for which Limbaugh is an unpaid adviser. (Landmark’s donors include relatives of Richard Melon Scaife, the Pittsburgh heir and newspaper publisher who funded the Arkansas Project, a smear campaign against the Clintons that served as the prototype for what we now know as Swiftboating.)

[snip]

Here is Levin’s cynical and unintentionally laughable rationale for the nomination, quoting Landmark’s news release:

Limbaugh … was nominated for the prestigious award for his “nearly two decades of tireless efforts to promote liberty, equality and opportunity for all humankind, regardless of race, creed, economic stratum or national origin. These are the only real cornerstones of just and lasting peace throughout the world,” said Landmark President Mark R. Levin.

“Rush Limbaugh is the foremost advocate for freedom and democracy in the world today,” explained Levin. “Everyday he gives voice to the values of democratic governance, individual opportunity and the just, equal application of the rule of law — and it is fitting that the Nobel Committee recognize the power of these ideals to build a truly peaceful world for future generations.”



Apparently Limbaugh's and the so-called Landmark Legal Foundation's "investigation" has been going on for months.

It is not April Fool's Day, folks. I am not joking, and neither is Jon Ponder at Pensito Review, where this story was found. This is what passes for conservatism today. Conservatives, including some who have commented on this site, like to claim that because we on the left expect our president to follow the law, to not lie us into unjustified wars, to uphold the Constitution, to have at least SOME gray matter in their crania, to know how to behave in public, to follow established international law, to not engage in torture, and to not spy on American citizens in broad, sweeping wasy, we have some sort of "Bush Derangement Syndrome" -- a play on the Clinton Derangement Syndrome that led to the witch hunt we saw in the 1990's -- financed by the same guy who now bankrolls a foundation that thinks Limbaugh was somehow jobbed out of the Nobel Peace Prize.

But it's more than just mouthbreathers like Limbaugh and Mark Levin. Today in the New York Times, Paul Krugman has the rundown of those afflicted with Gore Derangement Syndrome:

On the day after Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize, The Wall Street Journal’s editors couldn’t even bring themselves to mention Mr. Gore’s name. Instead, they devoted their editorial to a long list of people they thought deserved the prize more.

And at National Review Online, Iain Murray suggested that the prize should have been shared with “that well-known peace campaigner Osama bin Laden, who implicitly endorsed Gore’s stance.” You see, bin Laden once said something about climate change — therefore, anyone who talks about climate change is a friend of the terrorists.

What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?

Partly it’s a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.

And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job — to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda’s recruiters could have hoped for — the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.

The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the “ozone man,” but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, “the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam.” And so it has proved.

But Gore hatred is more than personal. When National Review decided to name its anti-environmental blog Planet Gore, it was trying to discredit the message as well as the messenger. For the truth Mr. Gore has been telling about how human activities are changing the climate isn’t just inconvenient. For conservatives, it’s deeply threatening.


More here, and you can read it all now that the Great Wall of Grey no longer exists.

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