Day: 8/25/2009

Glenn Beck: Arguing With An Idiot (Himself)

Posted by on August 25, 2009 at 6:59 pm. 5 Comments :

I know, the question of Glenn Beck’s sanity was settled long ago. But what is happening now is more than just a question of sanity. Beck seems to be losing what remains of his cognitive ability. On his radio program today, Beck staged a little play as a retort to a Jon Stewart segment that demonstrated Beck’s hypocrisy with regard to health care.

In this video Stewart plays clips of Beck repeatedly asserting that health care in the U.S. is the best in the world. Then he plays a clip wherein Beck trashes American health care as a nightmare. It’s pretty routine Stewart brilliance, but Beck takes exception on his radio show.

At the outset, Beck has his second banana, Pat, question Beck as to how he could both praise and disparage America’s health care system. Beck responds by saying…

“So to a 45 year old man with a wife, four kids, who have dealt with the medical system hundreds of times in their lives, your main argument to debunk the quality of our entire healthcare system is to bring up my one bad experience?”

Clearly Beck’s rebuttal is that the health care system is nearly perfect. He asserts that he’s had a lifetime of exposure to a system that has only failed him or his family on a single occasion. Then Pat, surprisingly, nails Beck with the “nightmare” quote that confirms that Beck was talking about the whole system, not a single, exceptional incident. Beck’s response to this was…

“The idea of being drugged and cut open to avoid dying of, you know, something else, then waking only to deal with paperwork and recovery is a nightmare, but like our legal system, or our political system, it’s the worst system in the world… except for all of the others.”

So in the course of a minute or two, Beck has asserted that our health care system is nearly perfect and rarely has any problems, and that it is riddled with problems but they aren’t as bad as every other country’s problems. He even explicitly says that our system is “far from perfect.” Which one is it, Glenn? Do we have a system that in 45 years made a single mistake? Or one that is far from perfect?

After this cognitive disconnect, Beck has the gall to say that Stewart “doesn’t bother trying to make sense of his arguments.” Well, that’s something Beck should know about. But it gets even curiouser. The subject changes to Beck’s upcoming book, “Arguing with Idiots” (something else Beck should know about). Beck declares that it is “the best book we’ve ever done.” Mighty high praise from a guy who seconds later can’t remember the name of the book and has to ask his radio sidekick. Shortly thereafter, Beck forgets the name of the 2nd Amendment expert that he quoted in the book. And then he can’t recall when the book is being released.

But what’s really funny is that Beck claims that he wrote this book for the youth, high school and college students who he says are riddled with ADD. Plus, he has an even larger purpose for the book:

“We’re trying to have we’re trying to make this interactive so when you’ve read the book and then you’re standing there and you’re at a town hall meeting and they’re like, yeah, well, healthcare… you just dial some digits and the arguments will come right to you because you’ll read it if you don’t take it with you all the time, you’ll read it and you’ll be like, oh, my gosh, I’ve got to remember that. So we’re trying to give you a way where you can just dial digits and they will be e mailed to you instantly to give you some of the arguments.”

You see? It is his way of funneling talking points to his town hall proxies. He even admits that his goal is to give his disciples a litany of arguments that they can deny came from him:

“Everything is footnoted in this thing so you can go to the original source and find out exactly, that way your kid doesn’t have to say, ‘I learned that from Glenn Beck” and immediately be discredited.’

At least he is self-aware enough to recognize that any data attributed to him lacks credibility. But there is still cause for concern when this guy can’t remember pertinent things about his brand new book or form a coherent argument detailing his own health care experience. And he apparently believes that his audience has the same cognitive deficiencies, which resulted in his writing this book for them. It’s pretty sad when you think about it.

I Have Here In My Hand A List Of Names…

Posted by on August 25, 2009 at 5:56 pm. 6 Comments :

On day two of Glenn Beck’s week long special “The New Republic,” Beck extends his diatribe against the Obama czars. On the first day he focused extensively on Van Jones, who was a co-founder of Color of Change, the group spearheading the Beck advertiser boycott (coincidence?). Today Beck sought to lengthen the list of Communist subversives that he imagines are squirreled away in the dark recesses of the government.

Just like old Joe McCarthy, Beck has in his hands a list of names. A list that he impugns as commie traitors. A list that he implies is evidence that President Obama himself is a commie traitor. The list: Cass Sunstein, Carol Browner, John Holdren, Ezekiel Emmanuel, Jeff Jones, are all respected professionals and public servants. Add to these persons the organizations at whom Beck is pointing his finger of righteousness: ACORN, SEIU, the Apollo Alliance, AFL-CIO, and any environmental group he can find. Yet Beck has no problem slandering these groups and people. At long last, Glenn, have you no decency?

Beck appears to have single-handedly reanimated the defunct red-baiting era of McCarthy with a new twist. He has no official power to investigate or punish his targets, but he has a bigger megaphone than McCarthy could have ever dreamed. And while McCarthy sought to remove the alleged fiends from government employment, Beck seeks to tie them to the President and whip up a holy fury against him that can only lead to a violent overthrow. Beck doesn’t even offer any other alternative to what he insists is a committed cabal intent on subverting our nation’s most sacred values. To the people who believe what Beck says, where is the line over which they would not cross to forestall the destruction of everything they hold dear?

It’s too bad that McCarthy didn’t have a funny mustache or some other distinctive characteristic that we could draw onto Beck to drive home the similarity. This week’s series of programs is establishing Beck as the foremost McCarthy impressionist since McCarthy himself.

Glenn Beck Targets White House Advisor Van Jones

Posted by on August 25, 2009 at 1:10 am. 45 Comments :

A couple weeks ago, Glenn Beck demonstrated the severity of his cognitive deformity by asserting that he didn’t think Barack Obama is a racist, just that he has a deep seated hatred for white people. Uh huh.

Subsequently, an activist group called Color of Change initiated an advertiser boycott of Beck’s program. The campaign has been wildly successful with three dozen advertisers now declining to buy time on Beck’s show. The remaining list of advertisers reads like a telemarketing wasteland.

In the wake of the boycott, Beck disappeared from the air for a week. There has been some dispute as to whether it was a forced time-out imposed by his bosses at Fox News, but regardless, he returned to work today.

He began his program by beseeching his audience to call all of their friends and tell them to tune in. He told them this would be an important show, an important week, and they should watch closely and even take notes. (Seeing as how this is Beck’s audience, they might want to have someone help them them with that last part). He even announced that on Friday he would have a “plan of action.” Then Beck proceeded to do virtually the same show he has been doing for months. It was his standard formula of innuendo, fear-mongering, and delusional paranoia. At one point he even wondered aloud why he is the only one who is aware of the looming menace.

“Many people will ask you, ‘Well, if these things are so true, why is that only Glenn Beck is saying them?’ Believe me, I have asked myself that question many, many nights. Usually about 2:00am when I couldn’t sleep. Why is no one else asking these questions?”

He might just as well have been asking “Why do only I hear these voices?” It’s a question that only his psychiatrist can answer. Beck doesn’t bother to provide an answer himself, he just leaps into the glassy-eyed speculation that has become his stock in trade. And while the bulk of the show was standard Beck fare, there was a particularly notable segment that consumed a significant portion of the program. It was his way of responding to the boycott without ever acknowledging that it was taking place.

The way Beck does this is to take on the scourge of Obama’s czars, a subject he has fulminated over before. And the first czar to be slandered by Beck is Van Jones, Obama’s Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Jones also happens to be the founder of Color of Change, although he has had no active role in the group for two years and was not involved in the advertiser boycott. However, it would be naive to assume that it was merely a coincidence that Beck chose Jones as his target on his first day back from an allegedly forced vacation that was partly attributable to the group Jones had founded.

This is typical of the Fox News tactical response to those they perceive as enemies. When Keith Olbermann goes after Bill O’Reilly, O’Reilly escalates the attack to NBC and GE’s CEO, Jeff Immelt. So when Color of Change reacts to Beck’s overt racism with a boycott, Beck escalates his response to the President of the United States. Without even mentioning the growing boycott, Beck strikes back by attacking Jones and the White House.

This is the Fox News version of a “scorched earth” strategy. The problem is that Beck’s violence-ridden rhetoric is likely to produce some actual scorching. Perhaps a better analogy is that of Jonestown. Beck presents himself in much the same manner as the murderously manic Rev. Jim. Like Jim Jones, Beck regards himself as a lonely visionary and the target of unseen foes. And he ministers to a dangerously suggestible flock in whom he stirs ever increasing trepidation. Let’s just hope that reason prevails before tragedy ensues.