Limbaugh is one of those people on the radio that has "issues with the truth." This guy needs constant fact-checking.

 

 

 

 

This is from the Columbus...You Used to be such a Nice Guy eBook.

 

 

Like Reagan used to say,
"Trust, but verify."
Attempting to verify what Limbaugh had to say was futile. For some reason he feels compelled to denigrate the indigenous population of the Americas.

 www.WhatDoYaKnow.com, the best that modern education has to offer. Truth through research!

Rush Limbaugh on Columbus
America’s political right weighs in on the Columbus legend.

The following is taken  from the internet site created and maintained by the staff of KNEWS. A subsidiary of JACOR Communications. FAIR is a native American advocacy group. For comments on this article email webmaster@620knews.com.

On Native Americans

The old gas bag himself in his younger iteration. He's a sad man.

According to entertainer, sports announcer, and acknowledged liar Rush Limbaugh, "There are more American Indians alive today than there were when Columbus arrived or at any other time in history. Does this sound like a record of Genocide?" No, Rush, it sounds like a misstatement of fact. In academic circles it's known as a lie.

FAIR:
"According to Carl Shaw of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, estimates of the pre-Columbus population of what later became the United States range from 5 million to 15 million. Native populations in the late 19th century fell to 250,000 due in part to genocidal policies. Today the U.S.'s Native American population is about 2 million." Keep in mind this figure does not include Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico, Central or South America. Most estimates (coming out of the universities across America) of the population in all the Americas to be in the 20--100 million range.

REALITY (according to Rush Limbaugh): (The blue text is courtesy the WhatDoYaKnow.com staff!)

Rush screams: The facts support me! FAIR is repeating the liberal myth that American Indians were systematically wiped out by white genocide. There were certainly atrocities against Indians by white people," but the full picture has Indians killing other Indians".

Did Rush fail to understand that the figures FAIR uses are published by the United States government and are the most conservative of all the population estimates?

As for the Indian population in the New World, Robert Royal, author of 1492 And All That: Political Manipulations of History, writes: "Estimates of pre-Columbian population figures have become heavily politicized with scholars who are particularly critical of Europe often favoring wildly higher figures. High starting points make Indian deaths by disease, warfare, and mistreatment all the greater. David Henige has dubbed this Native American Historical Demography as Expiation:

Yet despite their mistreatment by Europeans and devastation by European diseases (large numbers of Indians died as disease passed along trade routes, 80 percent without ever seeing a white man), some Indian groups are more populous today than in 1492. There are now more than 30 million Indians in Latin America alone, and there are several times more Iroquois in North America than at first contact." -- Robert Royal, "Hello Columbus: America Was No Paradise in 1492," Policy Review, Fall 1992, p. 44.

Where and who are these liberals Rush cites? Does he refer to the Native Americans doing research on their roots? Are the liberals the professors that spend lifetimes researching topics Limbaugh dismisses with some half-witted remark--short on scholarship, long on intolerance? Are the Spanish priests that wrote the oft-quoted histories and did the census studies a bunch of crazy liberals? Limbaugh is a veritable font of outright lies and anti-intellectualism! Did someone say, "Ditto"?

As for instances of "genocidal policies," Royal asks: "Genocide? Where? I don't know of any instances of Indian genocide. Mistreatment, yes. Warfare, yes. Deaths related to diseases caught from Europeans, yes. But systematic genocide, policies of genocide, no. Where are these policies? Where is the proof. It's amazing what they can get away with" [by interview].

If misters Limbaugh and Royal had bothered to do their homework they would have discovered systematic genocidal policy in the way Columbus and the other Spanish governors exacted gold from their less than willing subjects. It's all in the log books and the Spanish history books.

Hey Limbaugh, Why did Isabella have Columbus thrown in chains and dragged back to Spain after his third voyage?