I had assumed that by now the Rush Limbaugh story about “phony soldiers” would be old hat, but it really seems like the thing has legs of its own at this point. So I suppose it’s high time we take a look at the whole thing and marvel at what has become a two-pronged story. Not only do we have a chronicle of just what a windbag Rush is, but how great the media is at completely missing the point.

As a note. Yes, I’m going to be using MediaMatters for my transcripts. If that paints me as unfair somehow I welcome anyone to explain the problem.

Anyway, the story is old hat at this point. Rush took a caller named Mike and started accusing those in the military who don’t support the war and the surge of being “phony soldiers”. Everyone pounced on his verbiage, and naturally I’m going to quote the pertinent paragraph. With one key difference: I’m going to highlight a different part.

The phony soldiers. If you talk to a real soldier, they are proud to serve. They want to be over in Iraq. They understand their sacrifice, and they’re willing to sacrifice for their country.

Now, the media leapt on this one. Only they gave Rush far too much credit. They assumed he was speaking metaphorically. They figured he was saying that the only true soldiers are ones who support the Iraq War, and that anyone else is a phony in that they may serve and wear the camo but they aren’t of the same build as the “real” ones who blindly support this idiocy of a war.

Naturally, Rush and his supporters immediately started to defend themselves and point out Jesse MacBeth, the guy who pretended to be a veteran who’d seen horrors committed by the military. While it’s true he edited his transcript because initially he hadn’t spoken of it as though he meant only out and out frauds like a guy who serves 42 days and then claims he’s a war veteran, it’s very likely that Rush is telling the truth, and that’s not any better.

Keeping that in mind, we see Rush basically saying that the only way for a soldier to possibly come out in opposition of the war is if he’s not really a soldier at all. In Rush’s world, the only soldiers who exist are ones who support Iraq and the surge. It’s quite literally impossible to find a genuine uniformed member of the military who opposes the war in Iraq because all of them want to be over there, and it’s only the fakers who oppose it.

Brian McGough of VoteVets.org made an ad blasting Rush for his comments. McGough got it, listen to what he said:

Rush, the shrapnel I took to my head, was real. … My belief that we are on the wrong course in Iraq, is real. Until you have the guts to call me a phony soldier to my face, stop telling lies about my service.

See? He understood. Rush was saying the only way for a soldier for to speak out against the Iraq War is if he’s not actually a soldier who fought in Iraq. So McGough challenged Rush to call him a phony soldier to his face, he wasn’t saying “well Rush, if you think someone who got a purple heart isn’t a true soldier, tell me.” He was challenging Rush to re-assert that a man who served and willingly sacrificed for his country couldn’t possibly oppose the war.

Interpreting Rush’s comments literally and accepting his “excuse” is the only way his flailing in response to that ad makes any sense, when he made an even bigger ass of himself. As she wrote:

This man will always be a hero to this country with everyone. Whoever pumped him full of these lies about what I said and embarrassed him with this ad has betrayed him. They’re not hurting me, they’re betraying this soldier. Now, unless he actually believes what he’s saying, in which case it’s just so unfortunate and sad when the truth of what I said is right out there to be learned.

Now Rush’s idiocy is coming into full light. Once again, he is unable to comprehend the possibility that a true and honest soldier could actually be speaking out in such ferocity against both Rush himself and the Iraq War. Now obviously he doesn’t want to say that McGough is a phony soldier or a liar because that’s obviously not the case, so he resorts to one of his and his ilk’s favorite tactics.

Blame the liberals.

On Planet Limbaugh, there’s no way that McGough could have served in Iraq proudly and simultaneously be so strongly opposed to the course the United States is taking in Iraq. So the only possible explanation is that poor, naive little McGough was manipulated by the big mean liberals of MediaMatters to believe that Rush called him a phony soldier, from whence came the suicide bomber allusion.

Meanwhile the media, completely missing yet again, pounced on another section of that tirade. They focused on that suicide bomber comment where Rush said the following:

You know, this is such a blatant use of a valiant combat veteran, lying to him about what I said, then strapping those lies to his belt, sending him out via the media in a TV ad to walk into as many people as he can walk into.

Rush and his “dittoheads” can spin these comments any way they’d like, but this was absolutely, irrefutably, 100% a statement that likened McGough to a suicide bomber. It’s impossible to interpret the above in any other way. What got completely lost was what Rush meant by it.

He wasn’t saying that McGough is a terrorist. Far from it. He was likening McGough to an easily-fooled Muslim who gets convinced by Al Qaeda to walk into a crowd of people and blow himself up. He was saying that McGough is too much of a buffoon to understand when he’s being exploited for the evil purposes of an anti-American group, that he’s a naive victim who’s damaging himself by repeating the lies the left told him.

But instead of that, all the media’s doing is repeating the “phony soldier” and “suicide bomber” comments while completely missing what he really meant.

Now, all Rush needed to do to fix the situation was say something like the following:

So by now you’ve seen the VoteVets ad with Iraq War veteran Brian McGough. I’d like to issue an apology to McGough and clarify my comments. I wasn’t calling him a phony soldiers, I made the mistake of saying that people who serve support the war and that it’s only the liars and fakers who pretend to be soldiers that are speaking out against it. I disagree with McGough on this position but I would never claim he’s not a real soldier. He and those like him are not who I was referring to.

He didn’t. Reason being that the possibility wasn’t on his radar. When presented with an actual Iraq veteran who took shrapnel to the damn head and was publicly opposing the war, the only explanation is that he was being manipulated by the left. In Rush’s mind, there are two kinds of soldiers: those who support the war and those who are too stupid to know that the left is lying to them.

A day later, Rush attempted a mea culpa of sorts, going after the media for a while and then saying McGough is a hero whether or not he supports the war (in direct contradiction to his prior claim that he could only oppose it if he isn’t aware of the “truth” Rush is saying), but the fact remains that he did equate him to a suicide bomber and did say that only phony soldiers oppose the war.

To sum up. Rush didn’t claim that soldiers who oppose the war are phony soldiers. He said that only phony soldiers oppose the war and that all the real ones support it, that there simply aren’t any soldiers who oppose the war. Then when confronted with one who did, his only rationale was that he had been fed lies and unleashed the way terrorists manipulate easily-misled people on suicide bombing missions. And now he’s covering his ass.

Of course, the media missed all of that. Instead, they decided to focus on the sound bytes over the substance. Shame, that.