Rush Limbaugh berates 10th grader’s school essay
The best story I’ve heard this week by far was told today over lunch. Apparently, a co-worker of mine named George listens to the Rush Limbaugh show in his car, and yesterday heard him discussing Barack Obama’s comments about similarities between the recent housing crisis and the lead-up to the Great Depression (link goes to transcript). I imagine the comments were referring to the obvious similarities between those who obtained ridiculous sub-prime loans and those in the 1920s who bought stock they couldn’t afford on margin. However, Limbaugh decided that Obama’s comments were the result of a crazy “liberal education” – and even remarks how “lucky” he is that he didn’t graduate from college, thus allowing him to escape the perils of actual knowledge.
To prove his point, Rush says he did some Google searches for “Great Depression” and then proceeds to attack each of the results as liberal propaganda. Because we all know that college professors teach straight off of Google results pages. So my friend is listening and hears something rather striking… the name of one of our mutual colleagues – Paul Alexander Gusmorino (“The Third!” – I love the way Limbaugh says that).
Limbaugh found among the top results an essay written by Paul, entitled “The Main Causes of the Great Depression,” (link goes to essay). He quotes Paul’s essay and refutes each of its claims, dissecting them as if they were part of a Harvard professor’s lecture on the subject. He doesn’t pull any punches either. “Mr. Gusmorino, you better check Karl Marx and see if you plagiarized him in putting this piece together.”
Ouch. Those words would be harsh if they really were for a Harvard lecturer. But that’s not who wrote this essay. It was my friend who works as a Program Manager at Microsoft.
When he was in 10th grade.
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He’s called Rush because he loves that Big Pharma opiate rush that he gets from popping his pills.
Some conservative.
Follow the Pompous, Big Mouth Drug Addict, he is your Leader!
Rush is the Republican Rosie ODonnell.
Low blow, even for Rushy. I always knew he was an a**, but that just takes the cake…I thank my lucky stars that my early exposures to his radio show did not do any lasting damage to my psyche.
Limbaugh is an idiot and it often scares me that he has such
a large audience and millions of people listen to and believe
every word he says. You gotta love America and free speech
though.
I listened to the Rush Limbaugh show in question, and the point was that this is reflective of the revisionist history drivel that’s being taught in schools.
Trucker Tom is right. He was simply pointing out the revisionist history… and how Obama thinks like a Marxist.
Gosh, Trucker Tom and A Regular Guy are so bright, a little *too* bright if you catch my meaning.
They’re probably sock puppets for a crypto-Marxist terror cell.
Trucker / Guy –
Apparently the absurdity (and irony) of calling Obama a Marxist is lost on you. Seriously, Obama has more true conservative values (individual freedom and responsibility, fiscal responsibility, smaller government) than any Republican candidate in recent memory.
That said, you apparently missed the point of this post. I believe most of the rest will find humor in Limbaugh tearing apart the work of a 10th grade high school student on his live radio show.
The real problem is that anyone is listening to Rush in the first place. Please castigate them thoroughly. 🙂
hi. you’re on the front page of digg.com. hope that’s ok with you, if not, well … tough. this is an awesome story and so indicative of the mentality of the dittoheads who listen to Rush. probably he gets the best ratings the more ignorant he is, otherwise, they’d make him have like, fact checkers and researchers and stuff.
cheers! great story.
The essay doesn’t make any mention on it that it was written by a 10th grade student, so it’s open to any and all criticism.
Maybe Rush will google this comment…
“I wish all these fat bald fucks – Limbaugh, Rove – would go fight their own wars.”
I like Thom Hartmann’s take on the Depression
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thom-hartmann/theres-nothing-normal-_b_32532.html
Then Rush is right because your friend, Paul Alexander Gusmorino III, was not writing from his own experience and personal observations of living through the Great Depression, but was writing from biased sources. This just proves Rush right. The sources are so biased that even 10th greaders can’t write an essay about the Great Depression without getting major facts wrong and drawing incorrect conclusions based on those “facts” because his teachers and the written sources are already too biased. Do you blame the 14-year olds in the LDS compound in Texas for getting pregnant or do you blame the adults around them who got them that way? Do you blame the 10th grader for getting his facts wrong or do you blame his teachers and sources around him? Rush is right yet again.
welllllll…. The essay IS terrible. It treats “wealth” as a zero sum game and blames the great depression on the unequal distribution of it.
Conservative pundits are all the same, attack dogs of the right-wing belief system. I suspect that if we all ignored them, like internet trolls, they would go away.
While I hold a low opinion of Rush, in fairness, that paper was damn well written for a 10th grader. While perhaps not a “Harvard lecturer”, I would have assumed such a paper to be written by a college student. I sure as hell never wrote anything with that many cited references when I was in the 10th grade.
One other comment “was not writing from his own experience and personal observations of living through the Great Depression, but was writing from biased sources” – as opposed to Rush’s personal observations from living through that time?
Yeah, but your friend posted it on the internet. So that means it’s up for global criticism. And anyways, could you at least give a transcript of the actual interview? This is on the front page of Digg for crying out loud, and it doesn’t even say what Limbaugh’s argument was. Essentially you’re saying, ‘I heard some guy who heard that Limbaugh was insensitive to some kid who wrote an essay’. Now Diggers are going to love this. Anything anti-Rush or anti-OReilly goes straight to the front page, along with a slew of fat jokes and drug jokes (it used to be an interesting technology site). But the rest of us would like to decide for ourselves if what Rush said was offensive or not. It’s also crucial to letting people think for themselves, which is ironic since that is what Rush said your friend wasn’t doing.
Hey Conservatives! PLEASE, for the sake of all of us, do not go to college. Stay uneducated. After all, everything written in text books is liberal and you don’t want to poison those superior minds of yours.
It’s perhaps telling that Trucker Tom and Regular Guy don’t offer any meaningful critique of the essay, other than that it’s “revisionist history.” Okay, big guy, what does that mean? Use your words and draw out the argument a little bit.
Beyond that, perhaps what Rush is also missing is that when one receives a college education, one learns that a paper isn’t written as an expository narrative of the Great Depression, it’s to advance a particular theory or idea for intellectual critique. I’m an Econ major at a university, and this is an interesting viewpoint on the Depression of which I hadn’t considered, one of many. I think most people will accept that credit played a role in the depression, as did protectionism, and re: necessity of credit vis a vis the distribution of wealth he raises an intriguing point.
It’s a well written paper, particularly for a 10th grader, and shouldn’t be critiqued for what it doesn’t contain, but rather on the basis of what it does. Do I think this is the only reason the Great Depression occurred? No, of course not. Is it food for thought nonetheless? Yes, certainly.
If you were an intelligent or at all educated Republican, perhaps you would be arguing the people who say that Keynesian policy exacerbated the depression. Read some Friedman, Lucas, Real Business Cycle theory.
Dave – the first link is the transcript. If you register, you can hear the audio as well.
If the facts were wrong then they are wrong regardless of who spoke them.
Well at least Rush was smart enough to use Google to search…
Where’s the actual report?
Patrick – it is linked in the third paragraph:
“The Main Causes of the Great Depression.â€
http://www.gusmorino.com/pag3/greatdepression/
I’m no Rush fan, but you Sir are a moron.
Ok, who was the idiot that said that Obama is more conservative than most Republicans? Stop smoking Obama’s pipe. For those of you that listen to NPR that would be the new Lewinsky so to speak. Obama has the most liberal voting record than all Democrats in office right now.
Wow!Obama is for smaller government?
Proof please!
Rush is an idiot, but when it comes to your friend’s essay, he shows a keen grasp of the obvious.
Brandon, Obama is for *smaller* gov’t? How much smaller would gov’t get with Nationalized Healthcare? The only think he would make smaller is the military, and his motives for that are far from reducing the size of gov’t.
Brandon, as usual you are missing the point. Guess you are not the brightest when it comes to thinking things through. Let me suggest you look at facts, the logic, and then consider your feelings. That will help you become a better analyst and will help your ability to properly use logic. When you grow up maybe you will gain some wisdom and understanding and not just follow the crowd. Wow what a concept, become an independent thinker!
Josh, between the actual costs of fighting two wars, and the costs of caring for all those vets when they return, the war is likely to cost $800B to $1T. Nationalized healthcare wouldn’t even cost us half that, and the people of this country would actually be getting something of value for the taxes they pay.
Those of you who dogmatically spout the ramblings of Rush should really consider your source: he resorts to fallacious attacks, and in reading the transcript, offers practically no evidence to support his points. He does comment that America is “great” but offers no evidence for such a claim. He presents as fact that “quite a few” of the subprime mortgages were purchased by speculators, without offering a shred of proof. What is “quite a few” anyway? Is it 10%, 50%, more, less?
Rush appeals to the dumbest elements of our society exactly because he forms poor arguments, and spouts jingoistic rhetoric. And then to brag that he’s a college dropout? Why not brag that you endangered your 10-year, $250M contract by illegally taking drugs which cause hearing loss?
Not everything Rush says is wrong: he could look outside and tell his listeners it’s daytime, and he’d be correct. But that hardly makes him right about anything else, especially when he’s too stupid to properly form a coherent and logical argument for his views. Money doesn’t make you smart, it just makes you rich. You can’t buy smart.
Looking over these comments, a lot of them complain over the “revisionist history” being poured into students’ heads. Revisionist history is nothing more than telling history from a perspective besides that of political elites. “Revisionist” makes it sound like the history is untrue, when, believe me, there are few verifiable truths in history. At any rate, that term of “revisionist” history has fallen out of disuse, and the only people who use it are those upset that women and black people actually have a past.
“Rush is the Republican Rosie ODonnell”
Ohh my God, I think that is the best cut down I have ever, and I do mean EVER, heard! Hahaha, I’m “conservative” but don’t confuse that with “a follower of Rush”. Just as I rag Rosie and the far left “cut your arm off to spite your hand” politics, Rush is a whack job doing the same disservice on the right. I think of him as Bush’s personal cheer leader. Maybe he wears those small skirts and does intimate poses for Georgie puddie pie.
Oops, think I scarred myself with that last comment.
Were did the Sophomore get his information if not from his left wing school books. or his teacher.
What is the difference. If we can not teach history correctly why teach it at all.
Josh – I don’t want to get too far off-topic, since this post was really meant to just be a funny anecdote and to point out something very few were in a position to realize. That said, I’ll bite:
It is not hard to be for smaller government than what we have today under Bush. Spending is out of control. We have illegal wire tapping, Terry Schaivo nonsense, congressional hearings about *baseball*, government encroaching further on our individual freedoms, the federal government attempting to take away states’ rights (gay marriage amendment, NCLB, etc).
Healthcare is one of the few things that SHOULD be nationalized. The private sector has failed here, and for obvious reasons. The fact is, there should be no profit motive in healthcare – particularly not on the scale of the HMOs. My father is a physician, I’ve seen how these companies behave and how they treat people (and doctors), it’s just wrong.
Obama wants greater individual responsibility and less government interference. That’s exactly what I want. Read his book, listen to him speak. He doesn’t call for government censorship of video games and media – he calls on parents to take a more active role in their kids lives. He sees that the biggest problem with welfare isn’t a policy one, but rather the culture of dependence and lack of education, motivation, and inspiration. I don’t think he’s perfect, and I wouldn’t follow him as blindly as so many Limbaugh listeners follow his every hateful, ignorant word. But he is the best chance we’ve had in a long time to help put the US back on the right track.
Rick –
Thanks for coming to my site to insult me over a funny story, while contributing nothing to the story or to the related political discourse. Where would the web be without trolls?
JonEAppleseed – So the sources Paul cited, including the World Almanac, are liberally biased? You guys really are grasping at straws these days aren’t you.
Have you read those sources? Do you have some first-hand experience with the Great Depression to refute them? Rush certainly doesn’t.
@ Post #13 – ummmm and Rush IS speaking from his personal observations about the Great Depression? You’re implying that he either knows better or is the authority on non-biased information. People that spout his ideology get their information from biased sources as well. Sigh…I suppose all Rush fans think his words spew from the ass of God himself and therefore cannot be wrong…
Even funnier than that story, is the Rush apologists posting here that don’t get the irony.
Critical thinking is completely lost on some people.
You wouldn’t take your politics from Britney Spears, why are people still listening to this drug addicted fat slime?
Watch for Rush to revise Bush’s legacy…..The wars were Democrats fault! Nevermind that the righties controlled ll three branches of the govt…the lefties came in a year ago and screwed it all up!
If Rush was as smart as he thinks he is, he would of lived a better life. As it is, he has lots of money yes….. but he’s been unsuccessful at marriage twice and had a huge drug problem. Not exactly the track record of a successful well rounded individual.
To the “dittoheads”: Maybe what you’re missing here is that Rush went on the air to attack “liberal theories” about the Depression and chose for his example not a well-known work, not a piece by one of Obama’s literary professors, but some random article that surfaced in his Google search. Are the assertions in this piece factually biased? Are they controversial among major historians? God only knows, because they weren’t written by any acknowledged authority. They were written by a tenth grader. To suggest that this “proves Rush’s point” is the height (depth?) of idiocy. Rush didn’t know who he was criticizing or what> he was criticizing, because he couldn’t be arsed to dig any deeper.
This reminds me when I channel surfed past the 700 Club one day when Pat Robertson and the crew were doing an “in-depth” critique of evolution, based on things Robertson had found in the “encyclopedia.” They scoffed at certain “obvious” absurdities in the theory. But they were sitting there criticizing LAMARCK’s theories, not DARWIN’s! (If you don’t know, Lamarck proposed a long-disproved idea that was a crude precursor to Darwin’s much more elegantly constructed and argued concepts.) These guys were “refuting” the wrong theory, and had no idea that they looked like complete buffoons to anyone who knew what they were talking about.
“Revisionist” is another word like “appeaser” – it’s just a dog-whistle word to inflame right-wingers, but the ones slinging it a) don’t know what the word actually means, or b) if they do know, they deliberately misapply it. So they’re either stupid or dishonest, take your pick.
The recent clip where Chris “Tweety” Matthews took apart the raging wingnut who was calling Obama an “appeaser” like Neville Chamberlin in 1939 was hilarious. Matthews asked “so what did Chamberlain actually *do* in 1939?” The idiot didn’t even know, except to say, “he… APPEASED Hitler!” I even knew about the Munich meeting and the abandoning of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, which led him to take Poland too. I remembered that much from my History courses in *gasp* college (and high school, for that matter.)
But that dumbass slung it around on national cable TV and didn’t even bother to fookin’ look it up before going on! Because it doesn’t matter to them. It’s just a whistle-word.
In Rush’s defense, if I had to think of 3 hours of stuff to talk about every day, I would, at some point, probably resort to picking off mediocre high school term papers off the internet and ranting about them.
Do people really still listen to Rush Limbaugh anymore? Amazing.
another clown that couldn’t get any hits on his blog unless he uses the great one’s name.
pathetic
Rush’s rebuttal of Gusmorino is short on facts, and his supporters on this thread have yet to post a *single* fact refuting what Gusmorino wrote. But also note that Rush completely misread Gusmorino:
“For an economy to function properly, total demand must equal total supply…. Essentially what happened in the 1920’s was that there was an oversupply of goods. It was not that the surplus products of industrialized society were not wanted, but rather that those whose needs were not satiated could not afford more, whereas the wealthy were satiated by spending only a small portion of their income.”
Rush read this as if Gusmorino assumed a zero-sum economy. When I was in *eighth* grade, I’m sure I would have understood the actual claim here: When there’s too much supply and not enough demand, then prices will drop, sometimes precipitously. It doesn’t take much knowledge of history to know that this is exactly what happened in the Great Depression.