Limbaugh embraces Ugandan killers
October 26, 2011 | | Salon | Michael Winship
If you blinked, you might have missed it — a recent movie called “Machine Gun Preacher.” The film hasn’t burned up the box office and the title may have kept you away from your local picture palace in the mistaken belief that it was some kind of exploitation flick or the latest Quentin Tarantino exercise in postmodernism and ironic bloodbaths. In which case, who could blame you?
In fact, “Machine Gun Preacher” is the improbable but true story of Sam Childers (played by the improbable but true Gerard Butler, the shiny, muscle-bound Spartan king of “300″ fame). After a misbegotten life as a violent biker/drug dealer/ex-con, Childers had a come-to-Jesus epiphany and became a born-again Christian with his own congregation in rural Pennsylvania. But it was when he heard a missionary speak about church work in East Africa that he found his true calling. He went on to build an orphanage in the Sudan and protect the kids there by becoming a vigilante fighting alongside the ill-equipped and undermanned local militia. That’s where the machine gun part comes in.
Apparently, Rush Limbaugh didn’t see “Machine Gun Preacher” either. If he had, he might have known a thing or two about the enemy Sam Childers was battling against: the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rabid rebel group that for some 25 years has made simple, day-to-day existence a living hell for civilians – especially children — in Uganda, Southern Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Instead, as is his usual way – in other words, not having any idea what he’s talking about — Old Motormouth Limbaugh recently defended the Lord’s Resistance Army on his radio program because they “are Christians. They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan.”