The Tsarnaevs Are the New Welfare Queens

Rush Limbaugh has struggled mightily to come to grips with why Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev bombed the Boston marathon. Now he and others are reminding us that the Tsarnaevs were possibly aided by the thing liberals apparently love most of all — the bloated welfare state.

Rush Limbaugh has struggled mightily to come to grips with why Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev bombed the Boston marathon. ("I don't care why they did it.") Obviously, one must always strive to avoid being part of the "Blame America First" crowd. ("[Liberals ask] what is it about America that they hate that would justify this?") On the other hand, the Tsarnaevs' American life was in a hotbed of Blame America Firsterism: Boston. ("They hang around people that don't like America, they get inspired or influenced by it somehow, and it's no wonder.") And now Limbaugh and others are reminding us that the Tsarnaevs were possibly aided by the thing liberals apparently love most of all — the bloated welfare state. Tamerlan and his family got welfare benefits. "Now, he lost his benefits last year, Tamerlan, gonna be very honest here, Tamerlan lost his benefits last year, but according to people who've called the show, once you get an Obama phone nobody checks up to see if you still qualify for an Obama phone," Limbaugh said Wednesday. "He might have had an Obama phone." The Boston Herald's Howie Carr naturally makes the final connection. "Did they use Obamaphones to detonate the pressure-cooker bombs?"

Massachusetts state officials told the Herald that the elder Tsarnaev, his wife Katherine, and his 3-year-old daughter were getting welfare benefits until 2012, when they stopped meeting income requirements. The Tsarnaevs' parents (pictured above) also got benefits when the bombers were younger. "The news raises questions over whether Tsarnaev financed his radicalization on taxpayer money," the Herald reports. The newspaper then went looking for other benefits, but officials would not say whether they got food stamps, unemployment, subsidized student loans, Section 8 housing, or discounted cell phone service, which you might know as the Obamaphone. "More Leftist destruction," conservative commentator Monica Crowley tweeted.

Carr is outraged. "It's time for all the bureaucrats, paper-shufflers and flak-catchers to come clean on the Tsarnaev clan, those chiseling Chechens who tried to kill us last week," he writes. No rights to privacy should apply. The National Review's Andrew McCarthy says this is just what you should expect from an Islamist:

Ray [Ibrahim] recounts how a Salafi sheikh has explained that U.S. aid to Egypt is considered jizya. That is the tax the Koran requires non-Muslims to pay for the privilege of living in a sharia state. As Allah directs in sura 9:29, it is not enough for conquered infidels (usually referred to by the dehumanizing term, kuffar) merely to pay this tribute; they must do so “with willing submission” in a manner that makes them “feel themselves subdued” — the humiliating condition of dhimmitude. The same reasoning applies to social welfare payments — they, too, are jizya. 

McCarthy concludes, "In so many ways, Tamerlan Tsarnaev exactly followed the Islamic supremacist playbook." Was it the Islamist playbook? Or the welfare queen playbook? Limbaugh said, "Now we hear that the entire Tsarnaev family was on welfare. How could he not be an Obama supporter?" Not that we would ever blame America for such a tragedy.