Rush Still Urging Listeners To Support Abusers

Bow-wows and whining about monitoring.

While President George W. Bush, during his visit to the Pentagon, reacted with "deep disgust and disbelief" to new photos and video clips of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. guards -- radio host Rush Limbaugh continued to downplay the severity of the prison abuse; suggested it was "decent punishment"; and questioned the sincerity of the outrage expressed by Democrats, the media, and the public. Limbaugh also once again referred to a "new website that's supposedly chronicling" what he says -- apparently Media Matters for America -- and called it "a central clearinghouse for out-of-context quotes."

Some of those out of context quotes:

A couple of Americans are holding -- it looks like German Shepherd, some kind of vicious big dogs, the dogs are barking, bow wow arf arf arf, this big dog -- you know and the Iraqi prisoner is cowering there in fear, he's all nude. And the picture caption "Dog attacks Iraqi." No, the dog isn't attacking anyone, the dog's on a leash. The dog is scaring an Iraqi prisoner. [gasp] "No! We're scaring them, too? Is that allowed in the Geneva Convention?! We're scaring then with dogs?" Yes, my friends we are. The dog didn't attack anybody.

(35 minutes later) Apparently -- there's not a picture of it -- but apparently uh, well, there's another picture later where the nude Iraqi prisoner no longer cowering, um, in the corner against his cell, he's writhing on the floor with a pool of blood. Apparently, the dog did bite his leg, but there's no picture of that. I have just been, uh, informed of this. So I wanted to, uh, pass that on to make sure that the pass that on to make sure that the facts are out there. There's no picture of that, but apparently that's what uh, what happened. Sorry for the error. ...

How many of you went out to social occasions over the weekend and this subject, this story came up? And how many of you wanted to really say, "I don't see the big deal here. This is war. These are people who tried to kill Americans." But you didn't say it or some variation of that because you were afraid because you were with a bunch of people who were start yelling at you that you for being insensitive or coarse or crude or whatever, so you said what you thought you had to say in order to get along during a controversial situation if this conversation came up wherever you were. How many of you did that? How many of you did that?