Daily Inspiration Quote by Rush Limbaugh

Limbaugh’s move here is to turn a presidential self-congratulation into a gotcha, shrinking Obama’s moral headline into a procedural footnote. “Audacity” does the heavy lifting: it frames Obama’s statement not as reassurance after a scandalous era, but as nerve - as if declaring torture off-limits is a kind of theatrical overreach. The applause line follows: “has always been illegal.” It’s technically tidy and culturally evasive, a rhetorical trick that swaps lived political reality for a civics-text abstraction.

The context is doing more work than the law. In the wake of the Bush-era “enhanced interrogation” program, Americans had watched the government build a parallel vocabulary and legal scaffolding to make cruelty sound bureaucratic and permissible. Limbaugh’s insistence on “always” isn’t an empirical claim about state behavior; it’s an attempt to rescue national innocence by insisting the system’s self-description counts more than what it did. If torture is “illegal,” then any documented instances become anomalies, not policy - and the moral urgency dissolves into semantics.

The subtext is partisan jujitsu: Obama’s ban becomes posturing, and outrage over torture becomes performative liberalism. It’s also a preemptive defense of the previous administration without having to argue the merits of waterboarding. By anchoring to legality, Limbaugh invites the listener to feel smarter than the news cycle and morally settled: no reckoning required, because the rulebook says we’re already the good guys.