Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin appeared together at a for-profit Arctic Circle Jerk yesterday, the ninth anniversary of the Al Qaeda attacks on the United States. Although Beck said that his speaking fees would be donated to a charity, and that Palin was not being paid, no one explained where the estimated half million dollar ticket receipts would end up. (Hint: Beck’s nose and Palin’s shoe pantry).

Typical of a Palin/Beck enterprise, the profiteering on 9/11 extended into some blatant self promotion and exploitation. The pair joked about their future plans as possible presidential candidates and attacked their rivals in Washington and the press. But what was most disconcerting was their eagerness to disparage the country and dispense fear in place of providing solace on this sad anniversary. Beck was particularly gloomy, warning that complacency has set in:

Beck: We’re in trouble, the country is coming apart at the seams. […] I fear that we are forgetting what it takes. How do we not make the same mistake again?

That is vintage Beck, announcing some imagined Armageddon that is threatening to rip the nation apart any day now. Palin, of course, agreed, and pointed her bony, judgmental, finger at President Obama:

Palin: It starts from the top. Those who kind of set the tone in our country that would lead us towards a complacency that is very, very, very dangerous. I fear that is why we are seeing the patterns we’re seeing right now, especially over the last 20 months.

In speaking about those at “the top” who “kind of set the tone,” might she have been referring to former President Bush who famously declared that he didn’t care about Osama Bin Laden, then proved it by letting him get away and carpet bombing an unrelated country of other dark-skinned heathens? Palin never bothered to illuminate for us what patterns she was observing, but since there has not been any increase in domestic terrorism in the last 20 months, they must be visible only to her and those she has infected. And that was not the end of her delusional observations as she invented a new mythical history of the Statue of Liberty:

Palin: This Statue of Liberty was gifted to us by foreign leaders, really as a warning to us, it was a warning to us to stay unique and to stay exceptional from other countries. Certainly not to go down the path of other countries that adopted socialist policies.

To be fair, Palin didn’t invent that myth, she learned it from Beck whose ability to concoct reptilian conspiracies is unmatched by asylum-dwellers worldwide. The two of them have much in common philosophically, as well as financially. Both, of course, are employed by Fox News, so it should come as no surprise that they took time away from ignoring 9/11 to pimp their Network of Lies. While praising Beck for representing “why so many citizens never have to apologize for being American,” she made the point that, “It’s a brutal, left-dominated, lamestream, media world out there. What would we do without Fox News?”

Indeed. What would we do? What would we do without a network whose most prominent performer just admitted that it is an openly right-wing propaganda machine? I suppose we would all be apologizing for being American (which I only began doing since the advent of Beck and Palin). And we wouldn’t have Fox News personalities to tell us how much trouble the country is in. And we wouldn’t have been alerted to the unraveling of the nation and it’s separation from God. And we wouldn’t have been able to fork over $225.00 for the privilege of having a couple of ignorant fear mongers shower us with these lies on a day that the rest of the country was memorializing the victims of an historic tragedy.

Update: New video was posted at YouTube that shows a heckler rising to call Beck and Palin hypocrites. She was immediately drowned out by booing, and Palin stepped forward to say, “My son, and his soldier buddies standing over her, they’re protecting your right to say things like that tonight.” Apparently they weren’t protecting that right very well, because as Palin was saying that, the woman was being forcibly ejected from the hall by other attendees.