Limbaugh Defends Lord's Resistance Army

Radio host puzzled by US operation against murderous Ugandan militia
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 18, 2011 4:20 AM CDT
Rush Limbaugh Defends Lord's Resistance Army
"Now, up until today, most Americans have never heard of the Lord's Resistance Army," Limbaugh told his listeners. "And here we are at war with them."   (Getty Images)

Rush Limbaugh has attracted scorn even from his fellow conservatives with a bizarre defense of Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army. The radio host attacked President Obama for sending troops to track down the militia's leader, slamming the president for "targeting Christians," the New York Times reports. Limbaugh, overlooking the LRA's well-documented history of atrocities against civilians over the last 20 years, read a list of LRA objectives presented by one of its leaders 14 years ago, which he had apparently found on Wikipedia. Later in the broadcast, he promised to do "due diligence research" on the group.

The LRA was declared a terrorist organization by George W. Bush in 2001, and the editor of conservative website RedState.com says "lots of people who should know better" have been asking him about the militia. "People hearing the name assume it is a Christian group fighting radical Islamists in the Sudan or some such. It is no such thing," he says. "The group has notoriously gone through Uganda capturing children and turning them into soldiers and, when not successful, murdering them. The group engages in sex trafficking, slavery, murder, mutilation, and the list goes on and on." (More Rush Limbaugh stories.)

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