The way you can tell if a protest is effective is when the target of the action can’t stop complaining about it. For two days in a row, Glenn Beck has devoted valuable airtime to castigating the proponents of an advertiser boycott that began last year in response to Beck calling President Obama a racist with “a deep-seated hatred of white people.”
For Beck to divert so much time from fabricating paranoid conspiracy theories to fabricating smears on his perceived enemies is revealing. His anxiety could not be more apparent, even as he pretends that the efforts directed against him are making him happy:
“The fact is, I haven’t felt this good and positive in a long time. Why? Because the boycott attempts are the most transparent AstroTurf attacks I have ever seen or ever heard of.”
Ever? The truth is that the boycotts were initiated by a very small group that most people (including me) had never heard of. Color of Change began the effort with a small email list and a campaign to communicate with Beck’s advertisers. This shoestring effort produced surprising results, getting more than 100 advertisers to refuse to permit their commercials on Beck’s show. [Note: StopBeck later joined the effort further enhancing its effectiveness]
Beck spent the majority of his rebuttal inventing a plot that went all the way up to the White House. The first brick thrown by Beck was at his perennial nemesis, Van Jones. However, while Jones was a co-founder of Color Of Change, he left the organization two years prior to the Beck boycott. That didn’t stop Beck from building his cloud castle of hate.
He then tied Jones to Rev. Jim Wallis of the Sojourners. However, Wallis had nothing to do with the advertiser boycott, then or now. Wallis entered the picture after Beck took an astonishingly stupid stand against social justice and advised his listeners to “run” from any church that advocated it. Wallis responded by calling for Christians who believe in the venerable Christian practice of social justice to run from Glenn Beck.
And of course, Beck had to inject his distaste for working Americans by slandering unions. So he tethered Andy Stern to the boycott effort, although Stern and his SEIU had no part in the year-old boycott until about two weeks ago when they signed on with a new push by MoveOn.org.
After this hallucinatory construction of a widespread cabal attacking him, Beck capped it off with a wild accusation that it was a high level plot that the President was “coordinating from the Oval Office”:
“Is it possible, maybe, that pointing out every night that there are radicals, Marxists, and communists, in the White House, maybe that struck a nerve? Has someone decided that they must destroy my career and silence me because we’ve stumbled onto something? […] Has there ever been a case in American history…where an American president administration tried to destroy the livelihood of a private citizen with whom they disagree. Can’t think of any.”
Beck’s paranoia led to this declaration that nothing like this had ever happened before. He then immediately contradicted himself by comparing it to Richard Nixon’s famous “enemies list.” The only problem with that comparison is that Nixon’s list was documented and Beck’s delusions still only exist in his twisted cranium. What’s more, Nixon sought to use the power of the government against his opponents, but the Beck boycott relies entirely on the efforts of individual citizens engaging in free expression. Nevertheless, Beck elevates this to an absurd altitude wherein he literally compares himself with victims of Nazi atrocities:
“Where’s the media? Do the rest of you in this business think it’s gonna stop with me? Really? Once they get me what happens to you? Is there absolutely no chance whatsoever that you might be a target at some point in the future? What is that poem…First they came for the Jews and I stayed silent…”
Now they are coming for Glenn Beck. It is so like Beck to manifest his Messianic complex in this fashion. He is the persecuted one that suffers for his congregation. And his stylings are getting more televengelical and Apocalyptic by the day. Witness this fire and brimstone sermon:
It is a bizarre world. It is an upside down, inside out, quantum physics world. […] It is the eve of destruction in America.
I believe in God. I believe rights come from man, and this Constitution, and the founding of this nation, were divinely inspired. These are God’s rights and God’s freedoms.
If we appreciate those rights, if we do the right thing […] we are going to have to pay the consequence for our living and mistreating these rights. But in the end, have no fear, because nothing will thwart Him. Because these are His rights. This was His Constitution. This was His country for His purposes, not ours. And nothing…nothing…will thwart Him in the end.
Hallelujah. This may be the first time I have heard anyone declare that the Constitution was “divinely inspired.” To my knowledge, it has not been included in any version of the Bible. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison have not been beatified, nor is George Washington a saint. But in Beck’s mind a new holy doctrine has been proclaimed. One that permitted human slavery and denied women the right to vote. If the Constitution was divinely inspired, then what right did later generations have to amend it? Were they also the servants of God? And if so, did God screw up when he ratified Prohibition or the right to levy income taxes?
I have said this before, and it is all too apparent that it must be repeated: I genuinely hope that the people who care for Glenn Beck get him the help that he so obviously requires. It is way too tempting for his family and his producers and his hangers on, to hold back and revel in the riches he generates for them. But they will surely regret it when he self-destructs and splatters them all with the blood of their greed.
Now I’m sounding a little Biblical. And so I speaketh not further for the time is at hand for me to shuteth up. For now…..
If there’s one topic of study for which Rush Limbaugh can be regarded as an expert it’s character assassination. He has spent his career contriving dishonest assaults on his enemies that take the most vile form.
With regard to Barack Obama, Limbaugh started early by hoping that he would fail. Limbaugh expanded on that to accuse the President of being a socialist, a Marxist, and worse. He repeatedly asserts that Obama has an explicit desire to destroy America, the Constitution, and the values of faith and family that the nation embodies. If that isn’t character assassination, then I don’t know what is. Yet it is Limbaugh who is now whining to Politico about being the victim of the President’s wrath. In a CBS interview, Obama told Harry Smith that the vitriol of opponents like Limbaugh was troublesome. That seems to be a rather restrained description, but Limbaugh took great offense to what he portrayed as “constant attempts at character assassination.”
The funny thing is that Limbaugh should regard being considered troublesome by the President as a compliment. Isn’t it his intent to cause trouble for this administration? But he somehow has turned it into an insult. Even funnier is this bit of self-denial:
“I think the president is trying to distract me, to get me talking about ME on my show instead of talking about him and the regime’s agenda. But it won’t work. I’m wise to their tactics.”
But it did work. Limbaugh IS talking about himself. And if Obama wants to get Limbaugh to talk about himself he only needs to remember this one thing: The secret to getting Limbaugh to talk about himself is to just let him talk (preferably with a microphone nearby). Limbaugh spends a majority of his airtime talking about himself. He even continued doing it in his comments to Politico, describing himself as being “on the top of the mountain” of opposition to the administration. He can’t stop talking about himself, and the last thing he needs is provocation from the President.
Limbaugh’s pathological unawareness of his self-obsession is manifested in much of his hypocritical rhetoric. He simply cannot correlate his commentary with his own actions. Amidst the widespread reports of escalating hostilities within the fringe conservative community, Limbaugh had a warning for Tea Partiers from whom he says the country is being stolen:
“So you tea party people, I’m sure you know this, but they are trying to get you provoked so that you act in ways similar to the way they’re accusing you. […] They have a morally superior view of their agenda and of themselves. They look at anything that opposes them as evil, and with evil you must do whatever it takes, ends justify the means to wipe it out.”
Isn’t this precisely the view that Limbaugh has toward the administration (which he has lately begun referring to as “the regime”)? Doesn’t he consider his positions to be morally superior and his opponents to be evil? He certainly has expressed an intention to do whatever it takes to defeat the left he hates so fiercely. During the Democratic National Convention in he 2008 he literally said “Screw the World: Riot in Denver!”
“I’m dreaming of riots in Denver. Remember 1968?”
“Riots in Denver at the Democrat convention would see to it we don’t elect Democrats – and that’s the best damn thing could happen for this country as far as anything I can think.”
“I mean, if people say what’s your exit strategery, the dream end of this is that this keeps up to the convention and that we have a replay of Chicago 1968, with burning cars, protests, fires, literal riots, and all of that. That’s the objective here.”
These are unambiguous directives to his listeners, who are not called “dittoheads” for nothing. These are every bit as bad as the Tea Bagger who recently advised his followers to go out and throw bricks through the windows of the offices or homes of Democratic lawmakers, and to engage in other sorts of vandalism and violence. These are the irresponsible edicts of a man who professes to obey the law, but asserts that his opponents do not:
“Something else about the Democrats, deep in their hearts they know that we are law-abiding people. They know that we don’t make messes. That’s why they’re trying to stoke lawbreaking behavior from the tea party people because they know that we obey the law. They don’t.”
Oh really? And inciting people to riot, to burn cars and throw bricks, is lawful behavior? Limbaugh is a despicable provocateur and he knows it. He is using a fabricated argument to project his perverse philosophy onto his perceived enemies. And, as usual, he is encouraging his feeble-minded followers to engage in activities that he himself is too cowardly to consider.
Limbaugh’s hypocrisy is classic, but his depraved licentiousness is completely off the scale of social decency and civility. And this attitude is by no means restricted to Limbaugh. Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Sarah Palin, and the rest of the Fox News thugs, plus a variety of rabidly right-wing members of congress, are equally as culpable for the rancorous environment in the political atmosphere. No wonder there is so much vitriol wafting up in the steam from those tea cups.
In a fit of psychotic bluster, the folks at Fox Nation have posted an article with a headline that was manufactured from whole cloth. There is nothing in their reporting, or the column to which they linked, that remotely implied the message in this headline:
“IRS Hiring Thousands of Armed Tax Agents to Enforce Obamacare.”
The source for the Fox Nationalists is a column in Tucker Carlson’s right-wing Daily Caller. You might expect that Fox could rely on Carlson to support their hallucinatory journalism. After all, Carlson is a Fox News employee. But the article in the Caller, while misleading on it’s own, doesn’t go anywhere near the Fox misinterpretation.
The Caller’s headline was somewhat less dishonest: “IRS looking to hire thousands of tax agents to enforce health care laws.” It does not make a declaration of fact that agents are actually being hired, only that the IRS is looking into it. But more importantly, there is no mention of these agents being armed. In all likelihood, any new hires are going to be accountants with calculators, not mercenaries with machine guns. That, however, didn’t stop the Caller from posting an accompanying photo of heavily armed soldiers in combat gear who have nothing whatsoever to do with the story. And, of course, Fox Nation re-posted the same photo.
The Caller’s article is filled with falsehoods. Anyone who actually bothers to read the article will notice that there is no substantiation of its claim that Democrats are working with the IRS to hire new agents. The only confirmation comes from Republicans supplying their own speculation as to staffing requirements.
It is fair to assume that expanding efforts to collect revenue would require additional personnel. However, the article notes that the new hiring is aimed at collecting taxes unrelated to the health care bill. So are Republicans and the Fox Nationalists taking the position that tax cheats should not be pursued or held accountable? Should law abiding Americans have to shoulder the burden for these deadbeats? Yes, that’s exactly their position. Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee even issued a report that criticized the administration for proposing $8 billion to fund tax compliance measures. It seems to me that an $8 billion allocation to recover an estimated $300 billion in delinquent taxes is a pretty good return on investment and an effective way to reduce budget deficits.
The content of the article in the Caller is misleading in many respects, but the Fox Nation version is delusional. It states flatly that the IRS is hiring “armed” tax agents. It states flatly that these new agents will be dispatched to “enforce Obamacare.” Neither of those statements are substantiated and they aren’t even in the linked article. Yet the Fox Nationalists post the photo of soldiers in combat attire, weapons at the ready, deployed in a search and destroy posture.
The obvious intent of Fox is to frighten their congregation of Psycho-chicken Littles into believing that the “revenuers” are advancing on them to take their money and send them to FEMA camps where they will be forced to have abortions and marry gay socialists.
After struggling for fourteen months to derail the President’s agenda, and failing, Fox is upping the ante. They want people to be so afraid that they will fortify their bunkers, stockpile weapons, hoard rations, buy gold (brought to you by Glenn Beck), and prepare for Armageddon. And the way they advance that goal is by disseminating lies like this story from the scare-meisters at Fox Nation.
Update: Fox News continues to pour on the fear mongering. They are now reprising a story originally posted at Fox Nation almost two months: Boob Bombs!Terrorists Could Use Explosives in Breast Implants to Crash Planes.
Back in February the story was sourced to the ultra-wingnut WorldNetDaily web site. This time Fox is sourcing it to The Sun, Rupert Murdoch’s UK tabloid, but, hilariously, the article quotes “terrorist expert Joseph Farah.” In fact, Farah is no terrorist expert, he is the publisher of WorldNetDaily. The propaganda comes full circle.
It seems that they are just going to repeat this story every few months until either people are sufficiently terrified of titties, or until Al Qaeda decides to give it a try. I maintain my position that this could have a devastating impact on air travel. As I said in February:
We would need to start including Scarlett Johansson in our profiling criteria. And because the same explosive devices could be inserted in the buttocks, Jennifer Lopez would have to be added to the no-fly list.
Update II: All of this is reminiscent of the hysteria Glenn Beck tried to trump up over what he said was a civilian national security force that Obama was supposedly amassing to assault him and his congregation. As it turns out it was just an initiative to expand the peace corps and similar organizations.
[Also…] FactChect.org debunked the claim of IRS hiring thousands of agents.
President Obama signed the Senate health care bill into law this morning. While it is not the bill I would have written, it was still an historic moment that achieved something that 18 previous presidents failed to achieve.
But for much of the media, led by Fox News, the hot topic of the event was that VP Joe Biden whispered a congratulatory remark in the President’s ear:
“This is a big fucking deal.”
The President’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, reacted quickly to the growing hysteria in a tweet saying, “And yes Mr. Vice President, you’re right…” But this brewing scandal may yet overtake the frenzy surrounding the health care bill itself. I wonder if the President’s critics were just as incensed when then-VP Dick Cheney told Sen. Patrick Leahy to “Go fuck yourself.” right on the Senate floor?
And let’s not forget the time that Cheney pointed to a New York Times reporter at a campaign rally and whispered to George Bush “There’s Adam Clymer — major league asshole.” To which Bush responded, “Yeah, big time.”
For someone who has called the President a racist, fantasized about choking Michael Moore to death, and described Hurricane Katrina victims as scumbags, it is hard to imagine how he could descend to even lower depths of depravity. But Glenn Beck, wouldn’t you know, would find a way to do it:
In this repulsive venture into psychoanalysis, Beck attempts to explain Barack Obama’s alleged radicalism. Of course, Beck has no training in psychology and no insight either. His lunatic ravings are not only entirely unconnected to Obama’s life and motivation, they are factually incorrect and utterly illogical. But then the mangling of facts and logic are Glenn Beck’s foremost qualities.
Beck starts out with an appeal to sympathy for poor Barack:
“Here’s the sad thing that I don’t think anybody will ever really say about Barack Obama, because it sounds mean and I don’t mean it to be mean. This is a truly sad, tragic story. But the only way to understand, first of all, all the people around him, his thinking. I don’t think he’s an evil man. I don’t think he’s trying to do evil things intentionally. He really does believe that Marxism is the way – is the answer. It is the future. He believes that.”
See? Beck doesn’t want to be mean. He doesn’t think Obama is evil on purpose. He just thinks that Obama is a Marxist. He still thinks that Obama is evil, but that it isn’t his fault. For months Beck has waxed idiotic about the supposed Marxists that are fluttering around the White House, but this is the first time that he has stated flatly that Obama is one of them. And Beck even has an explanation for why:
“From the moment he was born he had contact with socialists, communists, Marxists, radicals. His father abandoned him. Why? So he could go off to a Marxist school in New York. Then his father left the country to go try it out. How tragic. What kind of scar does that leave on a boy? Then his mother…I mean this is…you tell me. What scar is left when the mom leaves a son who’s been abandoned by his father for Marxism, leaves the son with his grandparents so she can pursue critical theory, which is Marxism. Both parents leave a boy for Marxism?”
Let’s set side aside the fact that Obama’s father left when he was two years old, hardly enough time to indoctrinate him in the ways of Marx, even for an exceptionally bright child like Barack. And set aside as well the fact that Obama’s father left to attend graduate school at Harvard, not some New York Marxist academy. And never mind the fact that Obama was left in his grandparents’ care because his mother was temporarily unable to care for him, not because her critical theory studies required her full attention. In short, set aside virtually everything Beck says.
Beck’s conclusion is that Obama was so traumatized by abandonment issues related to his parents’ absorption in Marxism that Obama, in retaliation, did what any child would under those circumstances — He became a Marxist. It makes perfect sense. What other choice did he have other than to adopt the philosophy of the thing that allegedly tore his family apart? It is a sad, tragic story, isn’t it?
Perhaps on tomorrow’s show Beck will tell his own sad, tragic story? The one where his mother abandoned him by killing herself. Obama’s mother went away for a while, but she came back and witnessed her son on an historic path to the presidency of the United States of America. For Beck’s mother only death was sufficient to separate her from her demon seed. What kind of scar does that leave on a boy? Well, in Beck’s case it left a scar that led to dropping out of school, to alcoholism, drug abuse, a failed marriage, a career as an AM radio shock jock, and fame as a hate-mongering conspiracy nut who contributes nothing to society but fear and division.
Contrast that with Obama who, while scarred, worked his way through school, graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law, dedicated himself to helping the disenfranchised, taught law at the University of Chicago, entered public service and politics, and went all the way to the White House. So sad – so tragic.
For Glenn Beck to pretend that he can psychoanalyze anyone is truly sad. And that he gets it so very wrong is tragic. But it’s much worse than that. Beck is capitalizing on the misfortune of the President’s childhood and twisting it into some morbid fantasy that suits his political agenda. He is attacking Obama’s parents who are not alive to defend themselves. He is smearing the President with baseless accusations. And he is couching it all in a syrupy faux-sympathy that is just a facade to mask his overt and deranged hostility.
For someone whose history and family life is such a heinous disaster to plunge sanctimoniously into a dishonest judgment of the President’s psyche and family is reprehensible and is truly a disgusting new low for Glenn Beck. But on the plus side, it is not likely to be the last low that Beck will achieve. His capacity to nauseate seemingly has no lower boundary.
Fox Nation is at it again. Today they featured a story about President Obama’s determination to see health care reform implemented. But in their inimitable way, they twisted the message to reflect negatively on the President. Even worse, they aroused the natural inclinations of their readers to bask in a frenzy of assassination fantasies.
The Fox Nationalists ran with a headline that read: “Obama Invokes His Death in Health Care Talks.” Of course, Obama did no such thing. The article that Fox Nation linked to was an Associated Press piece on Yahoo! News. The sound bite that Fox latches onto was nothing more than a humorous aside:
“Obama joked that the political battle has contributed to the recent rise in his cholesterol…and the president noted how ironic it would be if health care drove him to his grave.”
So Obama did not “invoke” his death as a substantive part of the ongoing talks. But Fox Nation did. And the result was a rush of comments by Fox Nationalists who were only too happy to see the President dead.
“ironic it would be if health care drove him to his grave”.
This would be the best thing that could happen to the USA.
wow that’s something that we can only dream about
HEY MR. PREZ. PROMISE TO TELEVISE IT ON YOUR LAME STREAM MEDIA STATIONS,,,,, THE RATINGS WOULD GO THRU THE ROOF,,,
Promise?! Whatever it takes. I’m running out of pins for my nobama chia pet.
Many Americans wish we could grant you your wish
The progressives are so desperate to shove down our throats that which we DO NOT WANT.
They think they are so close, yet IF they pass it, it very well could be the literal de.ath of Obama, for TREASON.
He KNOWS there is NO Constitutional authority for this take-over of healthcare.
Go ahead, Obama, make America’s day.
OBAMA SHOULD KNOW THAT HIS THREAT WOULD ONLY ANSWER OUR PRAYERS….
So go ahead – do America a favor
Frankly I would call it irony if he went to his grave because of health care! Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy!
So it is not Obama who invoked his own death, but Fox Nation and its clan. And it isn’t only the bloodthirsty, racist, hate mongering, denizens of Fox’s blogosphere who are expressing their opinions in terms that imply Obama’s demise, it is also members of Congress and rightist pundits:
Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee said the president and House Democratic leaders are asking their colleagues to “hold hands, jump off a cliff and hope Harry Reid catches them.”
In a post on Andrew Breitbart’s Big Journalism website, Frank Ross wrote: “Mark Steyn is always right, whether he’s writing about Andrew Lloyd Webber or, in this case, the suicide-bomber-in-chief, Barack Obama.
Is it any wonder that the FBI has reported more threats against this president than any before him?
These people have way too much free time and far to little anti-paranoia medication.
It seems that Fox News has discovered a scandalette to occupy them until President Obama’s next TelePrompter sighting or Sarah Palin’s next tweet. This one concerns a new administration agency logo that is “scarily” similar to the one Obama used in his campaign:
“The Missile Defense Agency, which is part of the Defense Department, now features a circular red, white and blue logo on its Web site that has been characterized in some reports as “scarily” similar to President Obama’s former campaign symbol. Others have noted that it has a crescent and star design, evoking a common symbol for Islam.”
These alarmists need to make up their minds. Is this a propaganda effort to indoctrinate the mindless masses into blind Obama worship, or is it a signal to Obama’s brothers in Islam that their Manchurian plot is still operative.
The notion that this logo has any meaning other than as a symbol for stationery can only have been hatched in a diseased and fearful brain. First of all, the new logo takes its primary elements from its predecessor. There is a star met by red stripes representing the exhaust trails of a missile. That design was updated and the color scheme was reduced to America’s colors: red, white, and blue. Obviously the work of the enemy. The truth is that any logo could be accused of being inspired by the Obama logo if it contains the visual components of the American flag and is placed in a circle. That’s all the Obama logo is.
But what makes this even more ridiculous is that Richard Lehner, a spokesman for the Missile Defense Agency, thoroughly debunked this silliness. He said that not only was there no intention of copying the Obama logo, this logo isn’t even replacing the old one. It will only be used for defined and limited purposes. And the kicker is that this logo was in use prior to the 2008 election, so it couldn’t have anything to do with Obama. And it certainly wasn’t commissioned by his administration which didn’t exist at the time this logo came into being.
None of these facts, however, stopped Fox News from publishing the story, even though they had them and included them in the article. The editors at Fox must have thought that this was just too good an opportunity to start another ludicrous rumor that will shortly arrive at an email inbox near you. This is what passes for news at Fox.
Update: Not surprisingly, Andrew Booger Breitbart weighs in with an article by Frank Gaffney that actually accuses the Obama administration with treason on behalf of Islamic foes:
“Team Obama is behaving in a way that – as the new MDA logo suggests – is all about accommodating that ‘Islamic Republic’ and its ever-more aggressive stance.”
Gaffney also charges Obama with “acts of submission to Shariah” law. Admittedly, I never took these people seriously, but I am beginning to be concerned about their mental health. This is just insane.
Not that it’s anything new, but Glenn Beck has identified yet another plot by Barack Obama and progressives to bring about the destruction of America.
In this instance of mortification, Beck’s unique insight reveals that our nation’s children are the next targets of progressive evil. He declared with a flourish of panic that “the youth of America are being hijacked.”
It is an interesting observation from someone who is so markedly childish. His evidence for this comes from an appearance on The View by Sen. John McCain’s daughter, Meghan. The deviously young McCain correctly noted that the overt racism expressed by old fogies like Tom Tancredo at the Tea Party convention, would likely repel those of her generation. Beck’s reaction to this is downright psychotic as he damns a whole generation as commie dupes.
Beck: Lenin had a phrase for people like these. They were called “useful idiots.” I think a lot of our twenty-somethings are becoming useful idiots. One of those useful idiots seems to be Meghan McCain. She is John McCain’s like totally awesome like daughter.
Only Beck could find an association to Lenin in McCain’s words. The sentence fragment that Beck extracted to vent his outrage was when McCain said that “revolutions start with young people.” That sent Beck into a frenzy of mockery. He slipped into his “stupid person” voice (which is indistinguishable from his regular voice) and grumbled sarcastically about what idiots old people are. Of course McCain never came even close to implying that. The whole of her commentary had to do with how the lack of young people in a “movement” like the Tea Crusades would doom it to failure.
After relentlessly deriding McCain for several wasted minutes, Beck eventually came up for air and admitted that she was right after all – revolutions do start with young people. But in Beck’s interpretation it was the young who were exploited by elderly radicals. Perhaps Beck, the historian and fan of Founding Fathers, is referring to doddering old revolutionaries like Thomas Jefferson (32 years old in 1775), John Jay (30), James Madison (24), Alexander Hamilton (20), Thomas Paine (38), and that ancient eminence George Washington (43).
The point of Beck’s breakdown seems to have been that Obama and the progressives are trying to turn kids against their parents and undermine the family unit – the foundation of American society. It’s all tied into the battle for the sanctity of marriage and a kind of senior superiority. He belittles the notion that there is anything that adults could learn from their kids. Presumably Crosby, Stills, and Nash were in on this child endangerment plot 40 years ago when they recorded “Teach Your Children” which included a verse aimed at the kids to teach their parents as well.
How sad for Beck and his own kids. I assume they never talk back to him or express (or even form) their own opinions. He appears to advocate a philosophy of parenting that requires children to be obedient and silent. He seems to believe that past generations never had any of the natural tension that accompanies growing up. He regards children as appendages with no inherent value of their own. At one point he reduces the youthful quest for knowledge to nothing more than a lustful obsession and uses himself as an example of how petty and narrow-minded young people are. I’m sure he’s right as regards himself, but he certainly doesn’t have any appreciation for the intellectual curiosity and experiential adventurism that makes youth such a vibrant and fulfilling chapter of life.
Beck played some videos he found on the Organizing for America web site (a DNC project) that showed young folks describing their efforts to get their parents interested in voting. Beck characterized this as an Obama affront to the biblical mandate to honor thy father and thy mother. Those kids should keep their mouths shut and follow their parents’ example. Any exhibition of individuality or free will must be nipped in the bud. And any encouragement of such behavior is, in Beck’s demented eyes, a conspiracy to corrupt the young and produce a generation of socialist drones.
This is yet another Beckian sermon that elevates dogma over free thought. In the name of familial harmony, what Beck is actually promoting is parental tyranny and abuse. This might be a good time to review a bit of Beck’s biographical history. His parents were divorced when he was quite young, thus despoiling the sanctity of his family. He lived with his mother until she committed suicide when he was thirteen. Now, what was that about following your parents example. Glenn?
Glenn Beck’s glassy-eyed followers are irredeemably mesmerized by him and would sooner hack off a limb then concede that he was less than honest about anything. They wail plaintively that he is unwaveringly truthful and that no one has ever proven that he has lied. For the record, I have proven it many times.
On today’s program Beck was generous enough to provide another example of his compulsive dishonesty. And it was packaged in a familiar form for Beck: the old out-of-context video clip gambit. On this occasion Beck presented this segment of President Obama discussing health care:
Obama: [W]e said from the start that it was going to be important for us to be consistent in saying to people if you can have your — if you want to keep the health insurance you got, you can keep it, that you’re not going to have anybody getting in between you and your doctor in your decision making. And I think that some of the provisions that got snuck in might have violated that pledge.
After playing the clip, Beck went into outrage overdrive, complaining first about the sentence fragment “…consistent in saying to people…” implying that Obama was only “saying” these things and that he didn’t mean them. Only an idiot would interpret these extemporaneous remarks in context that way. And that, of course, is Beck’s built-in excuse.
But the larger corruption of the truth was Beck’s reaction to the news that some provisions were “snuck” into the bill that violated the pledge that no one would get between you and your doctor. Beck was aghast that the President would tolerate such legislative misbehavior. He castigated the President for not immediately putting a halt to Congress’s covert attempt to countermand his promise and tarnish his honor. Beck went on to declare that if the President had spoken up about this, that he (Beck) would heartily approve:
Beck: Well let me tell you something. Not only would that be the right thing for any president to do, his approval ratings would go through the roof. People would actually say “Well OK now, wait a minute. If he’s gonna do that I might actually listen to him.”
Apparently Beck wasn’t listening because Obama did precisely what Beck was accusing him of not doing. Obama expressly stated that he had caught the errant provisions and set about eliminating them. And this information was in the very segment that Beck had just played on the air. Except that Beck cut out the parts where Obama talked about scrubbing the problem provisions. Here’s the quote again in full. Note that the bold section in the middle is the only part that Beck played:
Obama: If you look at the package that we’ve presented — and there’s some stray cats and dogs that got in there that we were eliminating, we were in the process of eliminating. For example…
…we said from the start that it was going to be important for us to be consistent in saying to people if you can have your — if you want to keep the health insurance you got, you can keep it, that you’re not going to have anybody getting in between you and your doctor in your decision making. And I think that some of the provisions that got snuck in might have violated that pledge.
And so we are in the process of scrubbing them and making sure that it’s tight.
The complete clip shows unequivocally that Obama is keeping his pledge regarding the doctor/patient relationship. In fact, he was merely giving an example of incidents where institutional kinks can waylay legislation and demonstrating that he wasn’t falling for it. But Beck’s audience won’t know that because Beck unscrupulously edited it out. Then he portrayed the President as negligent for not doing something that in reality he did. And he even went so far as to admit that the American people would reward the President for doing the things that Beck left on the cutting room floor. And, of course, that’s reason Beck did it.
Beck certainly knew the content of the whole speech. So it is inescapable that he deliberately misrepresented it to advance his deceit. He purposefully truncated it to prevent his audience from seeing anything about Obama that they might regard as positive. And in the process he hammered Obama for not doing what he actually did do.
It’s too bad that most of Beck’s disciples will never hear about this fraud. Although many are so thoroughly bewitched that they might not even grasp it if they did hear about it. But it is important to continue to document it. Open minded people who haven’t formed opinions about Beck need to have this kind of information to keep from being duped by him.
If you weren’t already repulsed by the rampant cynicism and callousness of the uber-right in America, then an article just published in the National Review should do the trick.
Notorious NeoCon, Daniel Pipes, penned a column that purports to be offering President Obama advice on how to improve his favorability ratings: Bomb Iran!
The notion that any president should order military engagement for the purpose of shoring up polling numbers can only be acceptable to far-right vultures like Pipes. But Pipes is serious about this. The article is not titled “How to eliminate the Iranian Nuclear Threat.” It is titled “How to Save the Obama Presidency.” He even cited as an example the polling bump George W. Bush got after 9/11:
“Just as 9/11 caused voters to forget George W. Bush’s meandering early months, a strike on Iranian facilities would dispatch Obama’s feckless first year down the memory hole and transform the domestic political scene.”
This advice from Pipes could not be more wrong, both morally and strategically. On the moral scale, Pipes is suggesting that the President put the lives of American troops at risk for political gain. He argues that this would be “a dramatic gesture to change the public perception of him.” Why Pipes thinks that that is an appropriate justification for war, he never adequately explains.
But Pipes is also wrong from a strategic standpoint. He asserts that such an attack “would require few ‘boots on the ground’ and entail relatively few casualties.” This shallow assessment ignores the obvious lessons of past military debacles in the region. It is particularly surprising given that Pipes himself admitted that he had misread the risks associated with the war in Iraq. In his article in April of 2003, he belittled admonitions from regional experts that the invasion of Iraq would exacerbate tensions, escalate terrorism, and aid the recruiting efforts of Al Qaeda. He dismissed those warnings saying, “Actually, the precise opposite is more likely to happen.”
Pipes predicted few casualties in Iraq as well. He also bought in to the myth that the war would be short, would reduce terrorism, would produce stability, and that the Iraqis would greet us with candy and flowers. We all know now that the experts were right and Pipes was grievously wrong, as he himself admitted three years later in an update to his original article.
Will we have to wait another three years for Pipes to confess that his fatally flawed judgment failed him again? It certainly hasn’t stopped him from making a similarly erroneous assessment with regard to Iran. And this time he wraps it in a grotesquely political cloak to conceal his true intentions.
Pipes freely admits that he has no interest in seeing Obama’s popularity rise. So the suggestion to bomb Iran is not really a gesture of support for the Commander in Chief. It is more likely an expression of Pipes’ own obsession with hostility, and his thirst for blood. It is evidence of his antipathy for the people of the Middle East. And it is affirmation of his inability to form unbiased conclusions on serious matters like war.
For this he would sacrifice American and Iranian lives; he would promote the cause of jihadists; he would destroy the nascent democracy movement in Iran; and he would commit our nation to a third battlefront in a part of the world that is already unstable and distrustful of our motives. He is advising nothing less than a Crusade. And we know what happened the last time we had one of those.
In a fit of psychotic bluster, the folks at Fox Nation have posted an article with a headline that was manufactured from whole cloth. There is nothing in their reporting, or the column to which they linked, that remotely implied the message in this headline:
Update: Fox News continues to pour on the fear mongering. They are now reprising a story originally posted at Fox Nation almost two months: 
But for much of the media, led by Fox News, the hot topic of the event was that VP Joe Biden whispered a congratulatory remark in the President’s ear:
It seems that Fox News has discovered a scandalette to occupy them until President Obama’s next TelePrompter sighting or Sarah Palin’s next tweet. This one concerns a new administration agency logo that is “scarily” similar to the one Obama used in his campaign:
Glenn Beck’s glassy-eyed followers are irredeemably mesmerized by him and would sooner hack off a limb then concede that he was less than honest about anything. They wail plaintively that he is unwaveringly truthful and that no one has ever proven that he has lied. For the record,