MSNBC’s O’Donnell Slams Limbaugh As Biblically Ignorant; Contorts Scripture to Paint Jesus As Socialist
In his “Rewrite” segment last night, MSNBC's “Last Word” host Lawrence O'Donnell pounded out a 9-minute-long sermonette against conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh. O'Donnell slammed Limbaugh as biblically illiterate, reacting to a monologue from his April 25 program in which Limbaugh complained about liberals co-opting Jesus Christ for political purposes in the federal budget debate, posing questions such as “What Would Jesus Cut” from the budget. “What would Jesus take?” Limbaugh countered, answering “nothing.” O'Donnell vehemently disagreed, going on to cite Scripture references — divorcing them from context — in order to argue Jesus was a fan of “progressive taxation,” among other things. [Video posted after page break] “The New Testament does have an answer to Rush's question, 'What would Jesus take?' and it's not one Rush is going to like,” O'Donnell began, adding smugly, “And since he obviously has no working command of the Bible, it will surely shock him because he will be hearing it now for the first time.” “The answer is everything, not 35 percent, not 39.6 percent. One hundred percent,” O'Donnell continued, referring to marginal tax rates for top income-bracket earners, citing as his proof text a passage from Mark 10 in which a rich man comes up to Jesus and asks “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?” O'Donnell then selectively edited Jesus's answer: Go and sell all your possession and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven… But right after the ellipsis, verse 21 continues “and come, follow me.” O'Donnell also ignored the thrust of the story in context, which is the high personal cost in this age of following Jesus, but the eternal inheritance that awaits those who abandon all to follow Jesus, whose kingdom, Jesus himself repeatedly said, was “not of this world.”
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on April 26, 2011. Filed under