Rush Limbaugh vs. Lawrence O’Donnell – What Would Jesus Cut?

The political debate, as it is viewed on the twenty-four hour a day cable news television channels, is frequently more amusing than informative. The necessity of keeping an audience glued to the set means that insignificant things are hyped into being major stories. There is indeed a crisis a day, sometimes elevating political nonsense into seeming like a major story. It is fascinating to note that on the weekends, when those shows are not airing, there is never a crisis or indeed any news that seems to originate from anywhere, a sure sign that the stories are largely manufactured for the daily viewing audience. So we are treated to huge debates on things like whether President Obama was born in the United States and to political jokes masquerading as presidential candidates like Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and Donald Trump.

This “news coverage” may, however, have reached a high water mark of absurdity, when Rush Limbaugh sought to frame the national budget debate in terms of “What would Jesus Cut” and Lawrence O’Donnell responded to this idiocy by reading to Limbaugh on the air the entire parable of the judgment recorded in Matthew 25.

Before discussing this episode let me try to separate reality from politically-hyped hyperbole. There is no doubt that there is a debt crisis in this nation that cries out to be addressed in a realistic and responsible way. The excessive debt did not arise by accident, but rather resulted from very bad economic decisions made by very real politicians who normally cannot see beyond the horizon of the next election. First, a bit of history.

In 1993, as the first significant act of the new Clinton administration, a budget was adopted that involved cuts in various appropriations and which also called for certain targeted tax increases. It was then, as now, a very controversial debate. The biggest difference was that the government in 1993 was not divided. So it was a Democratic majority that passed this bill by a wide margin in the House of Representatives and by a single vote in the Senate. Indeed, that single vote was the tie-breaking vote cast, under the rules of the Senate, by Vice President Albert Gore. In the debate preceding this vote all sorts of apocalyptic language was used. Higher taxes for anyone, we were told, would trigger a 1930’s type of depression and create enormous budget deficits. Cuts in the military budget would make us vulnerable to a takeover by some foreign power. It was hard to say at that time just who that power would be, since the Soviet Union had collapsed a few years earlier and China had not yet achieved the status of a world power. Politicians can, however, create a fearful enemy whenever their political objectives require one. Rationality is not always a necessity in political debate, but generating sufficient fear to protect a politician’s base or vested interest is.

The bill was passed and signed into law, and now, from the vantage point of hindsight, we can surely say that it worked to the well-being of the masses of the people in this nation. The 1990’s were years of enormous economic expansion. More wealth was created in that decade alone than this nation had created in its entire history prior to 1992. When Bill Clinton completed his second term in the White House in 2000, he not only left with the entire debt of this nation erased, but also with a rare national surplus. The Congress also had enacted a law requiring that any new item added to the national budget had to be offset with money from an identified source. Deficit financing was out.

The new Bush administration sworn in in 2001 moved immediately to pass a sweeping across-the-board tax cut. This tax cut was applauded by most economists, who were suggesting that we were headed into a period of national budget surpluses for as far as the eye could see. Money obviously should in those circumstances be returned to the tax paying citizens, since it was no longer needed to fund the basic requirements of the government.

Then came the jolt to both the nation’s economy and to its sense of security caused by the attack by Islamic fundamentalists on the World Trade center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. A war against the Taliban in Afghanistan followed, since those 9/11 attacks had been initiated there. No budgetary provision, however, was made for this war. Before that military activity had been completed a new war, this one ideologically driven, on Iraq was launched. It was a far larger military operation and, like the conflict in Afghanistan, this war has also not yet ended. Once more, however, no budgetary provisions were made to finance it. No sacrifice was asked of anyone save the members of the Armed Services.

Then with these two wars draining the nation’s economic security, a second tax cut was proposed in Mr. Bush’s second term, this one weighted heavily on the side of the rich, whose wealth accumulation in the 90’s was unmatched in American history. It too became law. Passing this second tax cut was, however, difficult. It did not receive the approval of leading economists, including Alan Greenspan. So the only way to get the necessary votes to secure its passage in both the House and the Senate was to write a sunset phrase into the legislation. The second tax cut was to be “temporary” and was set to expire automatically on December 31, 2010. No proposed cuts in government spending were offered to offset the loss of federal revenues, indeed just the opposite occurred, when the largest entitlement program in our history was enacted to cover the cost of drugs for those on Medicare. So revenues went down and spending went up. The drug bill was also unfunded in the budget. It was the perfect formula for the explosion of the deficit and it worked in exactly that way. It also produced in America an era of unprecedented greed. Multimillion dollar bonuses were handed out like lollipops to leaders of American corporations by enormously generous boards.

The uncontrolled deficit is what ultimately caused the collapse in the economy that marked the final year of the Bush administration, producing the deepest recession in both American and world history since that great depression of the 1930’s. The government, first under Republican President Bush and later under newly elected Democratic President Obama, now poured massive amounts of federal money into rescue operations in order to save banks from defaulting, to rescue both the American automobile industry and the insurance industry, and to alleviate the distress of the unemployed that, because of this recession, reached 10% of the population. That in turn exacerbated the collapse of the housing market. Many people lost their jobs, their homes and their health care simultaneously even while industries, bailed out by American tax payers, continued to pay huge bonuses to those who had brought economic ruin on their businesses, opening the door for the most public anger noted in America in decades. So today we have an unsustainable deficit that must be addressed and no one seems willing to sacrifice anything to bring about economic stability.

The values by which some in America choose to live suddenly become very visible. This was the context in which right wing conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh sought to answer the question as to what Jesus would do in regard to the budget in order to bring about an economic revival and to restore this nation to economic health. Rush’s Jesus favored no new taxes and seemed to think that self-sufficiency should be elevated to a religious commitment, so he proposed the dismantling of the social safety net, including Medicare and Social Security as no longer affordable. In order to create self-reliance he proposed shifting the pain of our current deficit to the elderly and the poor who, he asserted, needed to learn that the government is not there to support them.

That was more than liberal leaning television talk show host Lawrence O’Donnell could stomach. I do not know what O’Donnell’s religious convictions are or what his religious background is, but in a fairly aggressive style he said that Limbaugh could lie about the economy and he could lie about President Obama, but “I will not allow you to lie about Jesus Christ!” Then, as if to have Jesus himself enter the debate, O’Donnell proceeded to read in its entirety to both Limbaugh and his own television audience, the Parable of the Judgment as recorded only in Matthew’s gospel.

In that parable, the final judgment is being carried out by the Son of Man, who divides the nations of the world like a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. The sheep are pronounced blessed and invited to enter into the larger life. The goats are dismissed as unworthy of entering that life. The basis for the judgment is quite clear in the parable. When the sheep saw the hungry, the naked, the sick or the imprisoned, they came and addressed their needs. This behavior was not emulated by the goats that neither saw nor responded to those in need.

In the parable both the sheep and the goats are startled to hear themselves being judged either positively or negatively, since neither could recall a time in which they had addressed or denied the reality of human hunger, nakedness, sickness or imprisonment. Then, says the parable, the Son of Man informs them that if they did not see or respond to “one of the least” of those who are their brothers and sisters, they had failed to do it to the Son of Man, or to God, if you will. Matthew in this parable echoes the words of John’s first epistle: You cannot claim to love God whom you have not seen, if you are unable to love your neighbor whom you have seen.

The budgetary battle going on in this country today is over whether individuals are to be responsible for themselves alone or whether each of us have some responsibility to care for one another with equal sacrifice and equal commitment. It reflects the same question Cain asked God in the ancient creation myth, “Am I my brother’s (or sister’s) keeper?” I, for one, would not like to live in a nation that answered that question with a “No.”

~John Shelby Spong

Read the essay online here.