Here's a story from the New Yorker that is delicious in its irony: It tells us that Glenn Beck is part of a long-term battle of ideas.
Maybe one could use the term, oh, I don't know, conspiracy, like the conspiracy from the Fascist, Communist, Socialist Progressives Beck tells us about every night.
Joe McCarthy, anyone?
I am waiting for the night Beck tells us about the list on his table of 55 known Progressives in the American Congress. This movement that is about bringing down America! The pile of books on his desk, which his staff has just put nice sticky tabs in so it looks like he or they actually read them, shows us how dangerous this movement is. These 157 Progressives in Congress are clearly undermining everything America stands for! This book, for example, Mein Kampf, shows exactly how the Progressives will take control of the government. This list, of 579 known Progressives in our own Congress shows us what kind of trouble our country is in! Watch out! There's one behind your couch! By the way: Remember to keep watching me, so I can tell you more obscurely threatening things about your life that don't really make sense when you think about them! But if you want me to think about them for you, go out and buy all my books and DVDs and then spend even more of your hard-earned American money on my rallies and special one-night-only-in-theater movie events happening soon across the country and in your neighborhood! Be careful -- that person sitting next you just might be an undercover Communist, Progressive, Socialist, Nazi, LaRuche Democrat in disguise. Even if it's your grandmother! You'll never know how to spot them unless you listen to all three hours of my radio show and watch my hour TV show every single day, no matter what!
(Just for the record, if you could get all of Beck's Communists, Fascists, Progressives and Socialists in a room together, they have so little in common they'd spend too much time arguing to actually take over the world.)
Oh yeah. I had a link there to discuss, didn't I? Some points from the story:
Several times a week, Beck informs his audience that socialists (whom he also sometimes calls Fascists or Communists) led by Obama have seized power, and that patriotic Americans must take their country back.
OK, what next?
On September 22nd, amid a diatribe about House, Beck cited a passage from “Secrets of the Federal Reserve,” by Eustace Mullins. The book, commissioned in 1948 by Ezra Pound, is a startlingly anti-Semitic fantasy of how a Jewish-led conspiracy of all-powerful bankers established the Federal Reserve in service of their plot to dominate the world.
Huh?
Beck’s readings of Progressive-era politics are nearly as bizarre. Whatever can be said about Theodore Roosevelt, he was not a crypto-radical. It was Roosevelt who coined the term “lunatic fringe” to describe the extreme leftists of his day, and his concept of New Nationalism—in which an activist government built a vibrant capitalism, partly by regulating big business—looked back to Alexander Hamilton, not Karl Marx. Nor was (President Woodrow) Wilson a Bolshevik; in fact, in 1917 he sent American troops to Russia to support the anti-Bolshevik White Army. At home, his reforms sought to break up monopolies in order to restore competition among small companies. “If America is not to have free enterprise,” Wilson declared, “then she can have no freedom of any sort whatever.”
So Roosevelt was a radical? Wilson was a Socialist who was against free enterprise? Who's the revisionist historian now, Beck-o? Do these sound like credible sources and reasonable conclusions?
The story sites another classic example of Beck logic. Here it is:
Part of Beck’s allure is the promise that he will reveal secret information. In one segment last year, he produced a drawing of fasces—which he described, anachronistically, as “the Roman symbol of Fascism”—and then a picture of an old Mercury dime, with fasces on the reverse side. “Who brought this dime in? It happened in 1916—Woodrow Wilson was the President,” he said. “We’ve been on the road to Fascism for a while.” Benito Mussolini, of course, didn’t adopt the ancient symbol of authority as the Fascist emblem until the nineteen-twenties; the designer of the coin, the sculptor Adolph A. Weinman, intended it to signify the nation’s military preparedness, and paired it with an olive branch to illustrate the desire for peace.
Apologies to Jon Stewart (and boy, is that a great link), but this is connecting two unrelated things. It's kind of like saying, for example, Barack Obama has a pancreas. Adolf Hitler had a pancreas. Therefore, Obama is clearly a vegetarian Nazi suffering from extreme flatulence.
Beck could find a conspiracy in a coffee cup. Cream from Progressive cows, no doubt.
Here's another story that clearly and concisely sums up my feeling about Beck, from Dana Milbank, who just wrote a book about the popular television common-tater head.
Love him, or hate him, the man is brilliant. How can you not admire a guy who went from a horrible addiction to becoming perhaps the most dominant force in American culture and American politics. I have respect for the way he has been able to see where the country is going, where the discourse is going and get out in front of it. I just have serious questions about how genuine his beliefs are. I think Glenn Beck is a charlatan, but he's the best charlatan there is.
Along that line, and lest we all forget, in the late 1980‘s, Beck resigned from his job as a Phoenix morning drive time radio host (the most prestigious time slot for a radio personality) after calling up a competitors' wife on the air and making fun of her recent miscarriage.
On the air.
During his show.
Live.
I do not buy the he-was-stil-an-alcoholic-when-that-happened excuse.
This incident says everything there is to say about Glenn Beck. What won't he say or do on the air to get attention?
If you still think Beck's tired, alarmist act is anything more than that, you are getting the intellectual soylent green you deserve.
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