Rush Limbaugh Must Be Right Because He Says He Is
God bless the dittoheads-(blind followers of Rush Limbaugh logic).
Last Friday for about an hour in the first half of the Rush show they had something to cheer about. But then they realized Limbaugh got fooled by a blog post. Limbaugh reported that his researchers had discovered that Joe Klein, a Time Magazine reporter, had unearthed ten pages from a college thesis, not the complete thesis mind you, in which President Obama allegedly wrote, as an undergrad student at Columbia, that the Constitution was a rag designed to enslave the masses and that the founders were behind the conspiracy to do so. The whole thing turned out to be a hoax by a blogger.The problem for Limbaugh was that he only found this out halfway through his show.
This is what he said when he found out that the basis of his ravings about Obama that day, which basically consisted of telling his audience that Obama was not patriotic enough to be qualified as President, were untrue.
Limbaugh must know President Obama quite well, right? He has to know what's in the President's heart, right? Obama could have written something like the thesis and probably has, (even if the thesis turned out to be a joke pulled on Limbaugh) according to the Limbaugh logic.
Limbaugh actually said when he realized he'd been had:
Ah, the dittoheads have to suffer on.
Really I just wanted to put the Limbaugh non apology /non mea culpa audio on my blog. I couldn't resist.
I have tried to tie this in somehow to my areas of practice, or to litigation generally, so hear goes a few comparisons. True stories from recent cases I've been involved in.
- A defendant in a car accident case testifies at a deposition in which she admits rear-ending my client that "it was barely a tap..I didn't even know I hit her." The defendant couldn't understand how my client got hurt. This despite the fact that there was extensive rear end damage to my client's car and extensive front end damage to the defendant's car, and that my client had to be removed from the scene by an ambulance.
- "I know that I cleared the sidewalk of ice. It was in real good shape. When I left Friday I threw some salt down." That's what a defendant store owner testified to at his deposition in a fall down case in which my client fractured her leg requiring surgical repair including the placement of metal plates and screws to put the bones back together. The fall occurred on a Monday night. The store owner never returned to his property to inspect it, put more salt down or shovel the sidewalk until Tuesday morning. The snowfall came down on the prior Wednesday, five days before the plaintiff fell. Fall down accidents can be difficult cases. In this case, there was actually a videotape showing my client walking from the bus stop over a mound of snow, at night, following the heavy snowfall a few days before, and walking on a clear portion of a neighboring sidewalk before stepping onto the defendant's sidewalk which had a narrow path which turned out to have been covered in a thin layer of black ice. Everybody in the neighborhood and particularly in the area where the plaintiff fell had managed to do a pretty good job of clearing the sidewalk, except this defendant. Somehow, in his mind, the condition of his sidewalk on the night in question wasn't his responsibility.
- A defense attorney files a brief with the court alleging that he is entitled to my personal notes from a focus group which I hired pre trial to evaluate my client's case. The problem is, the law is crystal clear that my notes are protected attorney work product that the defense attorney would never be entitled to get his hands on.
None of these stories compare to the Limbaugh defense of "I think it therefore it must be so." I guess the lesson to litigants and those involved in litigation generally here is fess up if you what you are saying won't hold up. Credibility is a very powerful tool. Use it to benefit you. Take a lesson from the flawed logic of Rush Limbaugh.
