Civility Watchdog: June 15, 2016, Rush Limbaugh

"[T]here's a news story out there today, and I first told you about this way back September of 2015, so not quite a year. Nine months, eight months ago. Here we go. … [The Iranian nuclear deal would end] the sanctions, which was going to make available to the Iranians $150 billion in frozen assets. And everybody said, "Why are we helping? Our ally is Israel. Why are we helping the Iranians nuke up?" Remember? This was last fall. So back to my program on September the 9th of 2015. "You know why the Corker Bill exists as it does, why there's never any serious effort to stop Obama in making the Iran deal? Do you have any idea? It was money. … [According to a story in Bloomberg], the Iranian national airline's a joke, the mullahs have ordered a number of replacement aircraft made by Boeing. Boeing wants the deal but in order to for the deal to happen, $150 billion in frozen Iranian assets has to be unfrozen. Now Boeing, Republican contributor, "the bottom line was that Republican politicians, elected officials basically had to please a very well-to-do donor or series of donors that were going to be able to engage in new --" In other words, the Republicans went along with this to satisfy Big Donor, is the bottom line."

-- Pundit Rush Limbaugh, June 15, 2016, referring to a story the prior day about Iran buying jets from Boeing.

Comment: First, Limbaugh is accusing people of basing their position on the Iranian nuclear deal on money rather than foreign policy and national interests. Who, in particular, is he talking about – he doesn't name any particular member of Congress – and what is his evidence that they did this for Boeing? Without names and evidence, Limbaugh is demonizing Republicans. Second, the idea that the Iranian nuclear deal involved "helping" Iran get nuclear weapons is a straw man: Iran had to give up 25,000 pounds of enriched uranium, and give up building a nuclear reactor that would have provided weapons-grade plutonium. People can disagree about what will best stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon in the long-term, but in the short-term they have lost 97% of their fissile material.