Glenn Beck, Savage, Levin Join Rush in Opposing Attack

Saturday, 07 Sep 2013 09:10 PM
By Jennifer G. Hickey

Conservative talk radio hosts are among those leading the charge in opposition to military action in Syria, offering predictions of dire consequences and criticizing President Barack Obama's strategy.

From Glenn Beck and Mark Levin to Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage, conservative talk show hosts lashed out at Obama's plans to attack Syria, with Hugh Hewitt one of the few voices supporting the action.

Beck, on his show on BlazeTV, said that with Russia and China adding their names "to the list of don't do anything in Syria," intervention would be akin to going "into World War III against Iran, China, and Russia."

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Making clear that he was not an "anti-war protestor," Beck said, "We are insane in what we are doing."

"We need anti-war rallies," Beck said, and called for Republicans and Democrats to unite in an effort to avoid the war, which he called "suicide."

Beck stated bluntly: “Don’t screw around with this. This is W.W. III in the making."

On his radio show, Mark Levin said he was "appalled" at House Speaker John Boehner's support for military action, even when the United States was not being threatened by Syria.

"We are not threatened by Syria. Syria is not going to attack us. They are not going to attack Israel," Levin said. "If Syria was going to attack Israel, why wait until now."

Levin charged that "Obama is defunding and hollowing out our military at the same time as he is sending five destroyers and a carrier fleet over to the Middle East."

"If Iran is the target — and Iran is the target — why would we go through Syria?" Levin said. "This is lunacy."

Saying that he not an isolationist, Levin said, "I have had about enough of the nut-jobs who want to go to war."

Michael Savage argued that the Obama administration is pursuing military action in Syria to appease Israel.

"Who's behind this? Who’s pushing it? Well, I suspect that it was Israel all along," the host of "The Savage Nation" told listeners Wednesday night.

"It's Israel pushing the United States and England and France and Italy and Germany to strike [President Bashar] Assad . . . So it's Israel that wants Assad's air force neutralized."

Savage asked his listeners, "If you can get America and France and Italy and Germany to act for you and they're foolish enough to risk a third World War, why not?"

Rush Limbaugh aimed criticism at Republican leaders in Congress, as much as toward the Obama administration.

Limbaugh argued that the Syrian policy has become a political debate and questioned why the administration and Congress were publicly discussing military strategy.

"Why are we talking about when, where, how, what? That alone proves that this is political, as everything Obama and the Democrats do is political. It's designed to advance their agenda. If you're really serious about taking Assad out, if you're really serious about ending this horrible series of events happening, you just do it," Limbaugh said on his radio show.

Limbaugh also wondered why some Republicans were supporting Obama's "incoherent, inconsistent, really risky, and unpredictable plan" for Syrian intervention.

"All of these Republicans signing on to this are participating in this fecklessness, and they're promoting this incompetence, and I'm sure they're doing this for their own political calculations as well. But we've got a presidential foreign policy here that is incoherent, and the last thing the Republicans need to be doing is signing on to it," Limbaugh said earlier this week.

In an appearance on Fox News' "The O'Reilly Factor," radio host Laura Ingraham stated her opposition to Syrian intervention and countered the argument that the international community would take inaction as a sign of U.S. weakness.

"I think the opposite is true. They are going to do what they are going to do, what is (in) their own self-interest," she told Bill O'Reilly.

"We lose moral authority in this case by acting," Ingraham said, adding that military intervention would be illegal and "the world does not want us to do this."

Hugh Hewitt is one of the few conservative talkers arguing in support of the resolution for military action.

Invoking the words of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Hewitt contended the "United States cannot walk away from the convulsions in the Middle East, from the agonies of children gasping for breath in understaffed Syrian hospitals, from the fact that the Syrians who are decent and moderate fear not only the butcher who rules them but the killers invading their land to replace savagery with savagery."

Hewitt does agree with other conservative hosts in criticizing how the administration has handled the situation in Syria.

"It is an incredibly difficult and complicated situation, one that grows worse with every day of inaction and is compounded by every display of fecklessness from a president who has given a whole new definition to the word feckless," he wrote in a Sept. 5 The Weekly Standard post.

The opposition is not confined to television and radio airwaves. The website RightWingNews conducted an email poll of conservative bloggers and found overwhelming opposition.

Of the 46 bloggers who responded, 84.8 percent answered "No" to the question of whether they thought Congress should give Obama authorization for any sort of military operation in Syria. Only 7 said that Congress should grant approval.

Urgent: Should U.S. Strike Syria? Vote Here

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