Rush Reveals His Hypocrisy

Rush And DHS, Sitting In A Tree...Rush Limbaugh's Stack Of Stuff Quick Hits Page has two things that caught my eye.  The first is just a revolting little bit of good ol' boy-ism, and honestly I can't say anything more about this than to quote it for you:

"You can't bring in a Playboy magazine and lay it around [the office], might upset women, you can't do this, it might upset women, you can't do that, it might upset this minority, all this sensitivity training. "

Nice. The sneering tone is what really makes it for me.  You'll excuse me if I'm skeptical about the very fact of a rich white male pushing back against sexual and racial harassment laws in the workplace.  Much less if that man is Rush Limbaugh.

ANYWAY, a little bit further down, Rush gets into something that I've been thinking about lately.  He quotes a report that Homeland Security is planning to hire up to 1,000 "cybersecurity experts."  Now if Rush had any kind of computer savvy, this would be where he would make fun of your neighbor's pimply teenage son being deputized by Homeland Security as a "cybersecurity expert."  

But no, Rush takes it in a different direction.  He asserts that this measure, hiring 1,000 cybersecurity experts, is "Department of Homeland Security to hire up to 1,000 new Obama spies." Whoa!  

Now first of all, has Rush ever complained about Homeland Security hiring domestic spies over the first seven years of its existence?  No he has not, even though domestic spying is essentially the Department of Homeland Security's mandate.  The DHS was founded in November of 2002 by George W Bush, and Rush had nothing but nice things to say about it when we were under a Republican regime.

The other day I was thinking that if President Obama had created the Department of Homeland Security, Rush would be squealing like an outraged piggy over the pork barrel spending, spying on Americans, restriction of freedoms, this terrible PATRIOT act that Obama had signed into legislation.  If you had asked Rush, it would have been one of the worst things ever to happen to this country!  But since the DHS was founded by a Bush, Rush thinks it is the awesomest thing in the world.

This is terribly bemusing to those of us who had second thoughts about living in a country which had elected a former head of the CIA as president.  And true to form, George Bush Sr promptly instituted the Total Information Awareness protocol, wherein the government requires top-level internet providers to allow them full access to internet traffic.  Thanks to Echelon, the United States government can, has, and has been listening to everything you say online for the better part of fifteen years now.

Oh but now that they want to hire some more people it's Obama's spies this and civil rights that.  Where was Rush Limbaugh when "Congress estimates that the [Department of Homeland Security] has wasted roughly $15 billion in failed contracts"?  Where was he when they discovered that the DHS's Deputy Chief Information Officer had obtained her computer science degrees from a diploma mill? When the GAO audited the department and found "widespread misuse of funds," including "$70,000 of plastic dog booties that were later deemed unsuable"? ^

Where was he?  Sitting at George W Bush's feet and looking up into his eyes adoringly, that's where he was.