Rush Limbaugh, the "He lies under oath" campaign, and Scooter

tl;dr

During the first weeks of 1999 when Republikans were still pushing a soon-to-be failed attempt to remove President Clinton from office, Rush Limbaugh hatched an idea to I guess remind his listeners that President Clinton (in his opinion) could not be trusted. His idea was to create a "banner" that had the words "HE LIES UNDER OATH" on it which could be taped to the television set for the upcoming State of the Union Address (sidenote here - I hate me some bush but I can't see myself getting any satisfaction from watching one of his SotU Addresses around a piece of paper that I taped to my own television, YMMV.) Anyway, this was something Limbaugh really began to push on his daily talk show, akin to other "paramount" events on his show such as Dan's Bake Sale and his bizarre pursuit on both radio and television in the early '90s of his http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1236">"Vince Foster Was Murdered" conspiracy theory. The closer we got to January 19th, 1999, the more he talked about it ... and you started to see the effects. "State of the Union TV Viewers Kits" started popping up online (here's an old one that's still around). Really all this was was just a printable "banner" sized so that it would hopefully cover up the crawl at the bottom of the screen so that it could impose the words "HE LIES UNDER OATH" on the viewer. Clever, right? To be fair this was 1999 and the web was still new to a lot of people - in fact I think rush was still using his antiquated 70277.2502@compuserve.com - and so this idea was probably a lot neater then than it seems now. So, Clinton "lies under oath", right? What were the articles of impeachment? Four were drawn up, two were approved by the full House (to be sent to the Senate) - one dealt with perjury in front of a Grand Jury and the other dealt with obstruction of justice (do I need to remind anyone of the frivolity of the cases involving Jones, Trooper-gate, Scaife, Tripp, et al during the '90s???).

Fast forward to 2005 when 'Scooter' Libby is indicted on five counts with three of the five being (you guessed it) lying to a Grand Jury and obstruction of justice. NICE! Obviously, Limbaugh's views are very different now with respect to Libby - "Everything in this case is just senseless. There was never any crime."

It needs to be said here that Limbaugh's unequivocal hypocrisy on this single issue doesn't make him wrong on everything else; further, it should come as no surprise to anyone that Limbaugh holds hypocritical views not only here but on more things than ANY OF US would care to sit and write out, and as such this little story isn't intended to be a "bombshell" or anything of that sort. That wasn't the purpose for putting all of this "to paper". Rather, it's really just about my own personal delight with these older "stories" about the much revered conservative radio hosts and the silly things they've done in public in the past, like Hannity attacking Abner Louima, "lying Louima" as he called him, by saying he was a homosexual, or Rush's older "Get the bone out of your nose" comment once to a black caller.

With respect to the "Fairness Doctrine", I still haven't made up my mind even though my immediate emotional reaction says to just tear down the whole malignancy of radio, 24 cable cycles, and book deals that sprouted out of Reagan's syphilitic dementia. I do support any sort of "Equal Time Rule" that allows an opposing candidate's views to be heard WITHOUT the talk show host constantly interrupting with easily dismissed red herrings; and I'd also like to some sort of "no signs near polling places" rule for radio. But this is all conjecture for another post and not really why I'm bringing up this one aspect of overtly hypocritical behaviour on the part of Rush. At the heart of it all, I just don't want good "lest we forget" stories like these to die off.

Thank you for reading.

In the final years of the Soviet Union, Rash insisted that the Soviet Union wasn't on the verge of collapse. Rash said it was all a big plot to fool Americans into complacency. Rash said that as soon as the liberals made us give up our giant military the Soviets would pounce on us and take over America. Rash had a regular theme based on this scenario he called the "Gorbechev Update."

Then the day came when Yeltsin stood on a tank and it was all over. How did Rash explain his theory being so wildly off the mark? Rash said that the Soviets actually did plan to pounce, but Rash knew about it, and Rash warned everybody, so the Soviets couldn't pull it off and plot failed. Rash said he won the cold war.

Good story! I hadn't even thought of that, but he was really big (no pun intended) into his whole "I don't trust Boris Yeltsin" thing, wasn't he?

Now you've got me thinking ... this thread may as well become a "Rush's Greatest Moments" thread, lol. Remember the $1M bet he made with the DNC that Clinton's Economic Plan would destroy the country? Ah, good times.

Or when he said Sherrod Brown was black and the New York Times was covering it up?