Of Obama And "Disrespect"

It shouldn't be necessary to refute this. It is patently ridiculous and a little reprehensible. But it's a common theme of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity in their continuing struggle to convince Americans that Barack Obama is unpatriotic.

Before the President's speech last week announcing an escalation of the war in Afghanistan, we heard repeatedly that Mr. Obama was a scoundrel for not listening to the "generals on the ground," the Real Americans. But on Thursday for Rush, at the tail end of a monologue about the party-crashing Sahadis, it was

The military's being disrespected, the Secret Service is being disrespected, and these are the people that put their lives on the line for this guy.

The head of US Central Command, General David Petraeus, spoke on Fox News Sunday (video below) about consideration of the applicability of the Iraqi surge to an increase of soldiers in Afghanistan. Does this sound like a man describing a President "disrespecting" the military?

Again, these were good discussions, and everyone tested each others' thoughts and principles and ideas on this, and these were also very lengthy sessions. You know, for the president to have -- I think it was 10 or even 11, if you count the Oval Office session this last Sunday night, and several of these two and a half to three hours long, that's a lot of really weighty debate that took place right there.

Maybe they came to the right conclusion. Or the wrong conclusion. But no one would have 25 to 33 hours of discussion with people he "disrespects." Rather, you do "disrespect" people, your audience, when you continually repeat something for which you have little evidence and present no evidence, but expect your listeners to believe.

It is therefore, not only a demonstration of Rush Limbaugh's contempt for President Obama. When at another point in his show, Rush compared the results of a health care poll whose results he liked (from Rasmussen) and one whose results he didn't like (Reuters), he exclaimed

All this poll shows, the Reuters poll, all it shows is that most stupid people want the government to take care of them. And they probably realize that as bad as the government does that, the government does a better job of taking care of them than stupid people do taking care of themselves. That's the only way to explain this.

Saying without explanation that our President "disrespects" the military, and (twice) calling people "stupid" because they disagree with you are fairly similar. It is a man with little respect for the American people, or at least the majority of us who aren't wealthy.