Wrong on so many levels
In case you
missed it the other day, on his Fox News program Glenn Beck linked
health care reform to 9-11, likening legislation designed to better
the lives of Americans to a fuel-laden passenger jet striking the World Trade
Center, and casting himself, as the leader of his 9-12 cult, as the only person
standing in the way of disaster.
It's the
type of deluded and offensive narcissism that we've come to expect from Beck,
and normally I wouldn't have given it a whole lot of thought afterwards, but
something else caught my ear in the middle of Beck's rant as he tried to cast
himself as some sort of latter-day Cassandra whose prophetic warnings about bin
Laden fell on deaf ears: “In the 1990s, I was on the radio warning people
about Osama bin Laden, not because I was some super-smart genius. I just
listened to the man's words. I really believed him. But that wasn't the top of
the priority list in America
– no, no, no. We were dealing with the fat interns and the definition of is,
and I like the rest of America
went back to sleep on the terrorist threat.”
It just so
happens that Glenn Beck has on his website a section called “Classic
Beck,” which contains selected audio recordings of Beck's radio
programs going back several years. One of those recordings is from August 22,
1998, and is described as follows: “Glenn debuts on the WABC in New York City. Glenn
discusses the recent U.S.
attacks on Afghanistan and Sudan
and if the American people are ready for the upcoming War on Terrorism.” And it
just so happens that near the beginning of this recording, Beck comments on
Osama bin Laden:
BECK: Now, another newspaper in Pakistan says that it received a
statement for the–from the spokesperson for Azma bin Ladin . Is that is
name? Bin Ladin? Bin Ladeen? Bin jelly bean, green bean, Mr. Clean? I love him.
He's hot. He says he's ready for war with the U.S. Oh yes? Thank you Mr. Baked
Bean.A respected newspaper quotes the statement as follows: “The war has just
started, and Americans should wait for the answer.” Now, Mr. Ozma Dig-my-scene,
I don't even know what the question was! Was the question “is my turban on too
tight?” Yes! I think it is. The blood's not pumping around the whole brain.
Loosen the turban, Mr. Clean, dig my scene. Oh yes, let's look at the latrine.
Does this
sound like Beck was “warning” about bin Laden and taking his words seriously?
Now, consider the time period - it's late August 1998, just a few weeks after
the Al Qaeda bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and President
Clinton just launched
cruise missiles into Afghanistan and Sudan in retaliation. If there was
ever a time in the '90s when terrorism was the focus of America's attention, this was it.
And Glenn Beck, debuting on WABC, used that time to make silly jokes about bin
Laden's name and dismiss his threats as a symptom of an overly tight
turban.
But the
Glenn Beck of August 1998 doesn't jibe with the Glenn Beck of 2009, who
desperately wants to be taken seriously as the last remaining bulwark against
the rising tide of socialism or fascism or statism or whatever. So Beck simply
rewrote his own history. Ironically, it was the actual historical records that
Beck maintains on his own website that undermined his attempt at revisionism.
"That's the audience," Beck said. "If you listen to me or you're a part of the rise of the right - that is who you are. Now, this is one of the worst I haven't even read it, but Stu has. This is the sloppy journalism that is happening at the lowest level, the lowest rung of journalism, Playboy magazine, to the highest level of journalism, the Washington Post, New York Times. It is so sloppy, and anybody who has ever even listened to me, if you've listened to me throughout the years, you know that I've called for George Bush's impeachment, I called for investigation into the scandals that were happening with the Republican Party, I told you that the I told you that the game that George Bush was playing with interest rates and these easy mortgages back in 2000 - I think 2003 or 2004."
"I said don't do it, it's a game, it's going to destroy us," Beck continued. "I told you that the economy was coming unglued. I told you there was some kind of trans-nationalist thing going on with George Bush at the border. I mean, I've been very consistent on all of this stuff, but they don't even look at any of that. In fact, the claims that I make about socialist Marxism, et cetera, et cetera, communist, I've only charged that there was one communist in the White House, in the administration, one. I have not made a claim that there's more - only one."
Beck was referring to Van Jones, the former so-called White House "green jobs czar." Beck also noted the hypocrisy in the way Playboy attacked him, but are reluctant to do so with other media personalities.
"So here's the really interesting thing," Beck said. "You know which side. You just ask your friends. You just ask your friends. What is the message that Glenn Beck is saying? What are the facts that Glenn Beck is saying? Or what are the facts that you are now saying to people? What are the facts? Don't make fun of because all that's happening, if you notice, Saturday Night Live, Jon Stewart, Playboy, South Park, all this week coming full guns a blazing on me. All they are doing is making fun of my mannerisms."
"That's all they're doing," Beck continued. "None of them will actually address any of the facts. If they can distract you with mannerisms, if they can ridicule me and make me into a joke without ever addressing any of the actual facts that I bring to the table, well, then they win. Don't allow them to do this to you. Make sure you stay on the facts. And when they go, Glenn Beck, he's probably a big fat Bozo. But let me ask you this: If there were a communist that were appointed by the president and he knew he was a communist, would that be a problem?"
This isn't the first time Playboy magazine, with its dwindling circulation, has attempted to disparage conservatives. Earlier this year, Megan McCardle of The Atlantic reported Playboy had alleged the Tea Party phenomenon was an AstroTurf plot and that long-time CNBC CME group reporter Rick Santelli was a plant, before pulling the story. They had also posted a story on their Web site, before pulling it as well, with some strong misogynistic language denigrating conservative women earlier this year.
In late September, President Barack Obama conducted a series of
five one-on-one White House interviews with reporters from CBS,
NBC, ABC, CNN, and Univision. For some reason—perhaps he’s
housing a secret civilian security force in the Roosevelt Room
and doesn’t want any fair and balanced reporters snooping
around—the president didn’t invite Fox to participate. For Glenn
Beck, the host of the hottest show on cable news, this Oval
Office slight offered an opportunity to provide some trenchant
perspective. “Does the president consider Fox some sort of
enemy?” he exclaimed, chortling with amiable resentment. “I mean,
no, it can’t be that, because, no, he’ll sit down with our
enemies. He’s even offered to sit down with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
And that guy, I mean, you call me nuts?”
The bit was Beck at his best: shrewdly self-marginalizing,
bitingly funny, and executed with perfect timing. A radio veteran
who got his first job in the business at the age of 13, Beck, it
turns out, is also a TV showman on par with Jon Stewart and
Stephen Colbert. But while America’s favorite fake newsmen have
clear-cut identities as comedians, the question of how to
categorize Beck is more perplexing.
When Beck was 8 years old, his mother gave him a record of old
radio programs that included Orson Welles’ famous performance of
War of the Worlds. Apparently the fictionalized news
report of an alien invasion became a foundational text for him,
an archetypal example of how you could create crazy, vivid,
apocalyptic drama out of mere words. To pay tribute to Welles’
work, Beck starred in a live version of War of the
Worlds that aired on his syndicated radio show on Halloween
night in 2002. Shortly thereafter, an heir of the radio play’s
author sued Beck and his producers for copyright infringement and
won an injunction that prevents Beck from ever performing the
play again.
The injunction, however, doesn’t prevent Beck from spinning his
own doomsday visions every day. In January he jumped from CNN
Headline News to the Fox News Channel and began experimenting in
earnest. Comedy Central’s The Daily Show had paved the
way by showing you didn’t have to stick to the same old
tried-and-true conventions when presenting the news. Anchormen
could be more expressive. You could use music and graphics and
video clips more creatively. And if you could do so in pursuit of
comedy, why not also in pursuit of melodrama?
In February, while discussing what it’s like to be angry and
enfranchised in America, legislated to the edge of Armageddon,
Beck introduced a new visual technique: His image appeared
simultaneously in two windows on the screen, one a typical
headshot, the other a close-up of his eyes, the better to
showcase his distressed but strong sincerity. On April Fool’s
Day, as Beck kicked off a segment on America’s drift toward
fascism, his image started shrinking until he was just a tiny
torso at the bottom of the screen, looking over his shoulder at
World War II footage of marching Nazis. “Enough!” Mini-Beck
shouted. Then the screen went black behind him, dramatically
framing his shrunken head and body as he continued his soliloquy.
It was news commentary as expressionist theater.
Beck’s subjects became equally avant garde. On one show, experts
tutored the host on how to survive the kind of financial meltdown
in which shopping centers were ghost malls and streets were
crawling with functionally illiterate meth-heads. A week later,
he started investigating the rumor that the Federal Emergency
Management Agency (FEMA) was building concentration camps around
the country. When that didn’t pan out, he set about exposing the
secret communist artwork adorning Rockefeller Plaza and other
buildings in New York.
Whatever the subject of any given episode, a common theme always
unites it with every other installment of the show: Something
isn’t right with America. The country is changing somehow,
subtly but surely, right under our very noses, and hardly anyone
else is noticing.
In August, Beck turned his attention to the mysterious
entities—alien invaders, you might say—who had infiltrated the
White House with barely any scrutiny at all: Obama’s czars. Van
Jones, Obama’s adviser on green business initiatives, was a
former member of a communist group and a self-described
revolutionary, Beck reported. Next, he aired video footage of
Mark Lloyd, diversity officer at the Federal Communications
Commission, praising Hugo Chavez’s “incredible revolution” in
Venezuela. The Van Jones episode garnered Beck’s highest rating
in weeks, attracting nearly 800,000 more viewers than his
previous show had. The Mark Lloyd episode, boosted by an
endorsement from Sarah Palin to her Facebook followers, did even
better, attracting slightly more than 3 million viewers,
according to the Nielsen Company.
It was the first time Beck’s program had broken the 3 million
barrier, an incredible achievement for a cable news show airing
at 5 p.m. After Beck unveiled more information about Jones,
including the fact that the adviser had signed a petition that
suggested high-level Bush administration officials may have
deliberately allowed the 9/11 attacks to occur, Jones resigned
from his position at the White House. Beck followed up with
revelations about a National Endowment for the Arts conference
call in which artists were encouraged to create works promoting
President Obama’s political agenda, and suddenly it seemed as if
the crusading New Canaan populist might single-handedly save
America from the attacking hordes of progressive pod people armed
to the teeth with stimulus dollars.
Not everyone gives Beck’s efforts positive reviews, even on the
right. New York Times columnist David Brooks accused him
of “race-baiting” after Beck said Obama is “racist” toward white
people. Former Bush speechwriter David Frum called one of Beck’s
many vettings of a White House appointee (Cass Sunstein in this
case) “beyond sloppy, beyond ignorant, proceeding straight toward
the deceptive.” “How on earth did this crackpot get a national TV
show?” asked Dallas Morning News columnist Rod Dreher.
In Dreher’s question we have what is perhaps the most concise
history yet of media in the Internet era. With every new
technological breakthrough, it gets easier and easier to push
unregulated information into the national discourse, potentially
exposing millions to misinformation masquerading as news. As
President Obama exclaimed in a September interview with the
Toledo Blade, it sometimes seems as if we’re moving
toward a future where there’s “no serious fact checking” and “no
serious attempts to put stories in context.”
In theory, a charismatic paranoiac like Beck is the poster boy
for this dystopian future. He’s got a very loud megaphone. His
communication skills are world-class. He’s ideologically driven
(even if no one can quite figure out what that ideology is). And
he’s willing to entertain some pretty dubious notions. But look
at his track record so far. He couldn’t sell FEMA death camps
because the facts weren’t there to back the story up. His exposé
of communist art at Rockefeller Plaza went nowhere because even
Beck’s viewers realize an old relief of a naked farmer holding
some wheat isn’t much of a threat. The Van Jones story had legs,
by contrast, because most of its facts were solid. With a change
in background music and a few minor edits, in fact, Beck’s first
long piece on Jones could have served as an advertisement for the
activist’s achievements—in part because its script closely
followed a 2005 newspaper article that was written as a positive
portrait of Jones.
Context, meanwhile, is Beck’s forte. He is constantly urging his
viewers to connect the dots and look at the big picture, even
when the picture exists only in his head. He is forever advising
them to consider stories not as transient, random, isolated
phenomena, as most newscasts do, but as parts of a larger,
ongoing narrative that grows more and more meaningful (and
menacing) the longer you study it. In a fractured, distracting
mediascape, where thousands of outlets vie for our attention,
it’s a smart approach that others are sure to copy. Legally
barred from re-enacting Orson Welles, Beck may have to settle for
being the 21st century’s answer to Edward R. Murrow.
Contributing Editor Greg
Beato (gbeato@soundbitten.com) writes from San
Francisco.
Want to know how the left really feels about free speech? Look no further than Huffington Post editor and co-founder Arianna Huffington. Huffington appeared on MSNBC's Nov. 19 “Countdown” to discuss a report by the Anti-Defamation League that alleges Fox News host Glenn Beck is “the most important mainstream media figure who has repeatedly helped to stoke fires of anti-government anger” and therefore endangering society. “It would be nice to think of Glenn Beck just as a joke, as fodder for this show and the “Daily Show” and others that point out how stupid some of this stuff is,” “Countdown” host Keith Olbermann said. “But this report, you know, suggests something else, this is - fear-monger-in-chief term is frightening.” Huffington agreed with Olbermann's assertion, but she took it a step further and suggested Beck's alleged fear-mongering warrants an exemption from the First Amendment, otherwise known as the “shouting fire in a crowded theater” precedent. “It is frightening,” Huffington replied. “Well, I would say the fear-monger-in-chief title should still be reserved for Dick Cheney, even in retirement. But barring that, there is something that we need to really pay attention to with Glenn Beck. We cannot just dismiss him. Because the truth of the matter is that there is a good reason why we have an exemption to the free speech protection by the First Amendment when we say you cannot shout 'fire' in a crowded theater.” Huffington declared that likening Obama's policies to ideologies prominent in Europe during the 20th Century, or anything else with an “-ism” attached to it is “irresponsible.” “And he's doing that every night. He's basically using images of violence to bring together with all that he's accusing the Obama administration of, which varies from racism to communism, Nazism and everything else in between. So, all that has definitely an impact. I believe words matter, language matters and he's using it in incredibly irresponsible ways night after night.”
Glenn Beck this week, without any preconditions, sat down to have a frank conversation with Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili. I say there were no preconditions because it was obvious that neither Glenn Beck, nor his people had even informed President Saakashvili that they would even have to break for commercials.
In his talk with Glenn Beck, President Saakashvili came across as a very earnest, concerned and down to earth kind of guy. To me President Saakashvili comes across as the kind of guy that Vladimir Putin of Russia would eat for breakfast. I guess you could say that I felt great sorrow for the Georgian President and his fledgling Democracy. When asked by Glenn Beck why the American people should feel the need to come to the aid of the Georgian Republic, President Saakashvili gave a plain, passionate explanation of just what the country of Georgia is. Georgia is a small democratic country that has thrown off the chains of socialist oppression, embraced the ideals of democracy and eliminated the Soviet style corruption that was once prevalent. Now the Russian bear is waging war, trying to reclaim old territory.
Listening to Glenn's interview of President Saakashvili on the radio and watching the interview on CNN, I could tell that one of the big questions for Glenn Beck is, “Why should we get involved with this entangling alliance?” Glenn obviously felt compassion, but the question all leaders face in this situation. “Is this something my country should become involved in?”
Meanwhile, back at the Kremlin, a different story is being told. I'm sure Glenn will love this one. Apparently Russia's media has reverted back to the Soviet style of operation. On Vesti FM, the Russian state radio station, it was announced that the “conflict” in Georgia, between Russia and Georgia, is really part of a conspiracy orchestrated by Dick Cheney. I'm sure that everyone at the Glenn Beck show as well as the White House and the rest of America, will get a laugh out of that one. The official Russian explanation on why their Army has crossed the border into Georgia and has been bombing every Georgian city and killing Georgian citizens is actually a conspiracy being run by the nefarious Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney. Funny, they did not mention Karl Rove, he must be way back in the shadows.
Glenn Beck save us. I could never imagine a man of Glenn Beck's integrity orchestrating a conspiracy such as this.
So the official story out of the Kremlin is……V.P Dick Cheney, in an effort to promote John McCain's chance to become President of the United States, moved the Russian Army out of Russia and into Georgia and started a war. Of course, the Russians claim that Georgia fired the first shot, never mind that it would be a lot harder for a Georgian to shoot a Russian if the Russian was sitting in his living room back home in Russia, watching tv. Who would have figured that you have to actually be there to be physically involved? Anyway, the Russians believe that the American people view Barack Obama as weak in the ways of war mongering and John McCain as strong. So McCain will beat Obama if we, the United States, become involved in another war. Way to go Mr. Cheney!
I can now understand that my conspiracy to get Glenn Beck elected as President of the United States will be an uphill battle. To think that I, J. Michael Warner, will have to compete in the arena of conspiracies with the likes of Dick Cheney and Vladimir Putin, come to think of it…..Hillary's still lurking in the shadows….. Making Glenn Beck the President of the United States will be like making a mountain out of a mole hill, yet it is a task worthy of undertaking.
I lose more respect for Hillary Clinton every day. It's not her political agenda or her views. It's not because she's a woman. It's not her record as a senator. And it's definitely not the legacy left by her husband. It's the frantic, pushy way in which she's been handling her campaign lately.
I still think she'd make a fine president for the most part. But I'm beginning to think she'd make an even better used car salesman.
Her latest, most despicable maneuver in her run for the White House is trying to reverse the Democratic Party's decision to strip the delegates from Florida and Michigan. She now wants those delegates to be recognized. Notice that this push for “justice” is only coming to the forefront of political discourse now that Hillary has already “won” her hollow victories in both Florida and Michigan.
And Lou Dobbs, I think you're a swell journalist, but shut up. Your four-member panel discussion of whether it's “right” to “disenfranchise” the voters in Michigan and Florida is irrelevant.
I'm from Michigan and I don't feel disenfranchised. I feel like a mistake was made and action was taken. Michigan, as a blue state, made a bad move in pushing up the date of the primary and we were collectively punished for it. That's a much better representation of “justice” than Hillary's new agenda. “Justice” means accountability for decisions, including bad decisions like the one Michigan made. “Justice” doesn't mean following the day-by-day whims of Hillary and Bill.
In reality, it would be absolutely appalling if the decision was reversed and the primary “elections” in Florida and Michigan counted. Hillary Clinton was the only name on the ballot in Michigan; it's absurd that these reversal options are even being theoretically discussed, yet alone seriously considered by some.
All of the worst cigar and “oral office” jokes considered, Hillary Clinton is beginning to look like more of a cheater than her husband ever did. The Democratic candidates all pledged not to campaign in Florida. And what's Hillary been up to in Florida today? Campaigning.
She says she isn't. She says she's only down there “thanking” her supporters. But when a candidate for office travels to a particular region (on the very day her name appears on a ballot in that region) to “talk to supporters” what can it possibly be called besides campaigning?
She's the only one campaigning in Florida–Obama and Edwards stuck to the deal. As the only one campaigning in the state, she knew she'd win. And she did win. And now she's “committed” to making the Florida primary count. How noble of her.
As a left-leaning voter, my intelligence is absolutely insulted by this attempt at a childish and transparent trick. I could have understood if it was Edwards who pulled it- -he needs some kind of sneaky trick to put him back in the game. But when Hillary uses underhanded techniques, it makes her look pathetic and unnecessarily desperate.
Yes, she “won” the state. And I can understand the Clinton campaign machine trying to play up that “victory.” Go ahead and celebrate. In reality, this hollow victory certainly could be important for her momentum. The despicable part isn't her insistence that Florida is a “victory”; it's the newfound fervor she has for making sure the Florida and Michigan voters aren't “disenfranchised.”
I used to be undecided. I wasn't sure if I was pushing for Obama or Clinton. I guess I should thank Hillary Clinton for making that decision a little easier with her behavior. Congratulations, Hillary. You “won” Florida. But for whatever it's worth, you lost me.
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