Goodbye, Glenn Beck

What better way to bow out of Fox and onto your own TV station than with a montage?

Fearing Saul Alinsky

It is almost a daily occurrence that Glenn Beck pontificates about the downfall of the world and how Saul Alinsky is partly behind it. Steven Taylor did some digging in a handful of academic online databases and found the following:

I tried the flagship journal of the discipline, the American Political Science Review for articles, full text, and “Alinksy” and got back 3 results (1946, 1968 and 1969).  Keep in mind the APSR is indexed back over a century on JSTOR.

Other major journals that I bothered with:

American Journal of Political Science: 1 (from 2002).

Perspective on Politics:  2 (2004 and 2006).

Journal of Politics:  2 (form 1974 and 1975).

If you search all 116 political science titles for “Alinsky” (without checking to see if they refer to Saul Alinsky specifically) one gets a whopping 55 article.  A search of “Saul Alinsky” in full-text article for the 116 journals in question gives me 38 hits, while “Alinsky, Saul” gives me 7.

Towering figure, indeed.

And this is the guy who supposedly is the kingmaker for indoctrinating the liberal intelligentsia at our universities and urban centers?

David Barton on The Daily Show

The “religious historian” for Glenn Beck was on last night. Check the videos.

A Memo To Glenn Beck

Conor Friedersdorf imagines a memo to Glenn Beck from Fox News:

Glenn,

Dude, sweet show last night! Speaking of which, I removed chalk from next week’s office supply order – figure we’ve got enough already to get us through. Bet one of your fans would pay big money for the chalk boards. Especially if you broke ‘em up with an ax or something on the last show.

I read up on David Brock like you asked. And I definitely see what you mean. Esquire would totally publish a long confessional magazine piece from you, but you’re right: it can’t be you admitting you were a charlatan or going over to the other side. It would be more like, “Wow, I looked deeper intothis gold business, which several people at Fox assured me was on the up and up, and now I see that a whole lot of wealthy entertainers on the right are just sticking it to their listeners. That’s why I’m gonna set up a fund for anyone who bought marked up commemorative coins because of me.” I don’t know if we should do that specifically, but you get the idea: we leverage the fact that the most conspiracy-minded people in the conservative movement trust you more than Roger Ailes or Rush Limbaugh (though I wouldn’t go after him unless he attacks first), and the genius of it is that we’ll never lose an argument because whatever dishonesty we choose to expose will be true: They actually are conspiring to mislead rank-and-file conservatives in all these totally egregious and provable ways!

Obviously, Fox has some dirt on you too, but it’ll be tricky for them to exploit it. What are they going to say, we observed Beck putting Vicks VapoRub under his eyes to fake crying during his shows, and we’re using it to discredit him now even though we were perfectly happy to broadcast what we knew to be fake? It hurts them more than us. It’s kind of awesome how our reputation is so crazy that no one outside our of core group of fans expects us to put out honest work anyway.

It’s worth a full read. It hits every nail on the head and has be grinning.

The 50 Worst Things Glenn Beck Said On Fox News

Enjoy this list.

Glenn Beck’s New Direction

Glenn Beck’s deteriorating relationship with Fox News, his desire to seek new business opportunities, or some other reason has lead for him to step down effective December 2011 from his daily TV show. Fox supposedly did not offer him a new contract. I see this as a big deal, but time will tell how this unfolds for Beck post-Fox. Outside the Beltway offers a good overall coverage of this news.

It will be telling if Glenn Beck transitions over to a radio personality similar to Rush Limbaugh, finds a hot opportunity elsewhere, or dissolves into obscurity.

Political Cartoon of the Day

I find it ironic that Tony Auth’s cartoon today is on Glenn Beck. I found myself watching at least 10 minutes of GB’s show last night because we have lost some channels on cable and I flicked past Fox and there he was. This cartoon covers it all – the fearful calls to resist these shadow people (George Soro’s), the gold commercials (what would you do then with a brick of gold if the dollar is losing value?), and again the fear that some future collapse is on the horizon. The commercials and personalities on Fox make my head spin. Even their news in between segments has to focus on who’s to blame for any recent problem.

I turn to ESPN2 and my head relaxes.

Qaddafi’s Supporters v. Glenn Beck

And we think Glenn Beck has lost his mind with his 15 chalk boards, suggestions to stock up on canned food and gold, and his progressive conspiracy theory. Then I see the above:

I’m not saying that the news on Libyan State TV is far from “fair and balanced”, but this fellow seems to out-do even Mr Glenn Beck for a unique perspective on events. In the middle of the news, he pulls out an AK-47 and declares, “In the name of Almighty God, I pledge to you, my Dear Leader, that I will sacrifice my last breath, my last bullet, my last drop of blood, last baby and child for you.”

Hypocritical Whining of the Day

Some on the right do not like Media Matters. To me, MM is an entity dedicated to exposing as crap the media that matters. If you are a Glenn Beck fan, you should by now loath MM.

It is no secret that MM leans to the left. David Kahane has a recent piece that comes off as if a two-year old is throwing a very nasty fit:

I doubt you wingnuts spend much time over at Media Matters for America, the George Soros–funded website that gives gainful employment to a variety of hacks and non-entities in perpetual high dudgeon, busily engaged in the practice of monitoring media that matters for America. It’s a kind of charity, really, a place for those who might not otherwise find gainful employment either as real journalists or as Democrat state senators in Wisconsin to find some meaning in their lives — which they do by hating you. (emphasis mine)

One could make a turn in their piece after a paragraph like that and not write out a screed, ironically in a similar way to how MM writes about the right. That would be, gasp, hypocritical, wouldn’t it? I then read the rest (it is screed worthy) but the next two sentences suffice in making my point:

Warning: Reading anything on the MMFA website is a little like watching semi-literate chimps busily engaged in a poo-flinging contest hosted by Fox News, but we liberals are nothing if not compassionate, and the poor “senior fellows” and lesser primates who have to type this stuff are our fellow human beings, more or less.

So imagine my surprise when I, me and myself turned up as the subject of some Media Matters muttering, occasioned by one of the pearls I throw before you swine every week in my continuing effort to get you rapacious, Wall Street–loving, troglodytic, racist Rethuglican hatemongers to understand us fair and tolerant lefties better, so we can all just get along until that happy day when we can finally get rid of you with legal impunity.

The Real Newt Gingrich?

This reminds me of Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly – do they truly believe what they spout and support or is it all a political choice that brings them many benefits (money, for one!):

A few years later, having fathered two children with his high school math teacher (whom he had married at the age of 19), Gingrich returned to Georgia and launched his electoral career, running for Congress in 1974 and again in 1976. His incumbent opponent was John Flynt, an old-fashioned conservative Democrat best known for being on the League of Conservation Voters’ “Dirty Dozen” list of environmental reactionaries. Unlike many Georgia Republicans who sought to out-flank Dixiecrats by coming across as better-bred right-wing extremists, Gingrich ran to Flynt’s left, emphasizing environmentalist and “reform” themes, and enlisting significant support from liberal Democrats. Unfortunately for him, these were the two worst election cycles for Georgia Republicans since the 1950s (the Watergate election of 1974 and Jimmy Carter’s Georgia landslide of 1976), and he lost narrowly both times.

But then Flynt retired, just as Gingrich’s form of liberal Republicanism was falling out of fashion nationwide, in the run-up to Ronald Reagan’s election as president in 1980. When Gingrich ran for Congress again in 1978, this time against a more conventional Democrat, he reinvented himself as a fighting conservative focused on anti-tax and anti-welfare messages. He also burnished his conservative credentials by heading up a statewide group opposed to President Carter’s Panama Canal Treaty, a major right-wing (and specifically Reaganite) cause at the time. Gingrich won as a newly minted conservative, riding a conservative trend in his state and the country. It’s hard to know whether his earlier liberal persona, which seemed consistent with his private behavior and the polyglot crew of environmentalists he hung out with at West Georgia, or his later conservative incarnation was more genuine. But it is clear his turn to the right was well timed, and launched him not only into Congress but into a career as a national political celebrity.

If you don’t feel like reading all of that, this short bit sums it up:

ut the lesson of Gingrich’s early years is that he has a jeweler’s eye for a political opening and a willingness to transform himself as necessary to exploit such opportunities when they arise. This could be one of those times: Because the 2012 Republican field is exceedingly weak in ways that would benefit Gingrich, he could end up in a surprisingly good electoral position if he decides to run.

Glenn Beck and Google

We all know of Glenn Beck at this point. We know that he can incite vile hatred, violence, and his big one: paranoia. Lately, he said he wouldn’t use Google anymore because he believes it has government (American, that is) ties and was somehow responsible for the overthrow of the Mubarak regime in Egypt:

“I’m really not sure that I want my search engine involved in government overthrows, good or bad,”Beck said on his Fox show. “There is a strange thing going on with this search engine and our government. And we all have to choose who we do business with.”

If you actually break down his theories, you would never even believe him.

Steve Benen gives a backdrop:

Wael Ghonim is the head of Google’s marketing for the Middle East and North Africa, and he also helped organize Egyptian protestors during the recent uprising. The Mubarak government arrested Ghonim in late January and held him blindfolded for 11 days. Upon his release, Ghonim, seen as a hero, helped further inspire those demonstrating against their government.

Google is for freedom of speech as China, Iran, and now Egypt are against it. Each of those countries during one period of uprising, demonstrations, or something else has blacked out its internet and forced its people to communicate to the outside world via fax machines. I am sorry to burst Beck’s bubble, but many people, including those who work at Google (who, I might add, are not robots; they have emotions and thoughts, just like us) were against the Mubarak regime. Glenn Beck’s own “university” and TV show supports gold and many right-wing politico’s and groups. Does that make him untrustworthy? It all depends on who you ask, of course.

Steven Taylor wraps it up for us:

This presentation is typical Beck:  vague and ominous with just enough bits of information tossed in to sound like maybe he knows what he is talking about.

Taylor’s advice could just about apply to anything Glenn Beck.

SOTU Responses Are Afrar From The Consensus

So says Frank Rich:

New polls show that Americans don’t even buy the principles behind these specifics. To hear the G.O.P. wail about it, you’d think the entire country was obsessed with the federal debt — cited 12 times in Ryan’s under-11-minute speech. But only 18 percent of Americans chose the deficit as a top priority for Washington in the most recent NBC/Journal survey and only 14 percent did in the New York Times/CBS News poll. Job creation was by far the top choice — at 43 percent (Times/CBS) and 34 percent (NBC/Journal).

Health care was a low-ranked priority too in those polls. And for all the right’s apocalyptic rants about the national horror of “Obamacare,” most polls continue to show that Americans are evenly divided about the law and that only a small minority favors its complete repeal (only one in four Americans in the latest Associated Press/GfK survey). The surest indicator that voters are not as inflamed about either the deficit or “Obamacare” as the right keeps claiming can be found in Karl Rove’s Wall Street Journal musings. To argue that Americans share his two obsessions, Rove now is reduced to citing polls from either Fox or a Brand X called Resurgent Republic, which he helpfully identifies as “a group I helped form.”

Those findings are a relief and makes me thankful that everyone isn’t a little Bachmann or a Ryan.

Rich finishes with a fine point:

Obama must be laughing about how the party that spent a year hammering him for focusing on health care over jobs is now committing the same supposed sin. And one can only imagine his astonishment on Tuesday night, when the G.O.P. respondents to his speech each played Jimmy Carter to his Reagan by offering a grim double-feature of malaise and American decline. Hardly had the president extolled record corporate profits and a soaring stock market in his selectively rosy spin on the economy, than Ryan, who has the television manner of a solicitous funeral home director, was darkly warning that America could be the next Greece. Bachmann channeled Glenn Beck to argue that we are living in a nascent police state where government “tells us which light bulbs to buy” (G.E.’s, presumably).

Bullet in the Dome

Thanks for the warning, Glenn.

Transitions

2010 is winding down. In this short year, MJ and I have moved into a townhouse, got married, started grad school, quit a job, quit grad school, packed up and moved, almost moved to a farm, started a new job (x2), and are going to move again this week. We plan on having this move be our last for a long while. It is only going to be 10 minutes away from where we live now.

With all that said, my few days teaching this week, packing, and moving will cut down my blog time quite a bit. Look out for a new contributor to the blog: Andy Hill.

As for me, I am trying to work through my bitterness towards the religious right, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and those who flaunt their white priveledge. I am being serious when I say this all; this all goes beyond my anger and affects my marriage, moods, and life. Those three I need to protect.

Quote of the Week

“…Beck is just one more American con artist in the P.T. Barnum tradition, a shameless pseudoconservative bottom-feeder who will say anything to keep the spotlight on himself while the money rolls in,” says Dana Milbank in the New York Book Review.

Boy do I dislike that man:

Zaitchik documents Beck’s every flip-flop, every swim in the polluted pools of the John Birchers and paranoid Mormon theocrats, every cruel remark (he called Hurricane Katrina victims “scumbags”), and every offensive comparison (he once likened Al Gore’s campaign against global warming to Hitler’s persecution of the Jews).

One More Reason Not To Watch Fox News II

I am having a hard time finding reasons why anyone should take Glenn Beck seriously. People for the American Way compiled a large study on Glenn Beck and display his violently inciting rhetoric, which is quite anti-Christian or ‘God’:

He has joked about putting poison in Nancy Pelosi’s wine, choking Michael Moore to death with his bare hands, and beating Charles Rangel with a shovel.

“I’m thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I’m wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out.”[xii]

“I want to kill [Rep.] Charlie Rangel with a shovel.”

“Every night I get down on my knees and pray that Dennis Kucinich will burst into flames.”

Obama Reaches Out

For Obama’s bipartisan sake, his caving in to the Bush Tax Cut extension is a good thing. It better quell some of the huffing and puffing from the Right that he won’t “meet us on our side” and follow some unspoken order from America to take up a smaller government.

Lately, I am seeing two lanes of thought in relation to “Obama’s welfare state / dependency programs”. One side sees that these programs have people on their rolls who are ignorantly and lazily dependent on government money and the Democrats have done some sort of lobotomy experiment to make them forever follow them their handout trail. The other side sees some people on the program rolls that are generationally dependent but also many enrolled who wholeheartedly need it. A case and point example for the first side can be seen below:

The emerging deal is not all good news, of course.  It is not wise to provide extended unemployment insurance for the duration of 2011.  That’s likely to contribute to persistently high unemployment and discourage the adjustments necessary to get more people back to work.  And temporary tax cuts are much less effective than permanent ones at spurring productive investments and job creation.

The author banks on a black and white schema for unemployment insurance. He sees that this insurance provided for those out of work will just keep their butts planted down on the couch and give them no hope other than to be a parasite of the government.

Such views taken up by the author can be credited to only knowing a few people on welfare or unemployed and who also happen to enjoy not having a job and not making much off of the government. This view is quite condescending and probably comes from a privileged white ledge, far removed from their ivory towers and white suburbs. Another source of such poppycock stereotyping is Rush Limbaugh. When Rush Limbaugh makes racist jokes or jokes insinuating racial stereotypes towards Barack Obama, one not only gets a bad picture in their head of Barack but also of black people. Rush must not think too highly of black people, even ones who have risen out of a tough single parent home and gone on to be a constitutional scholar and president of the United States.

After sifting through the racist innuendos and the seemingly truth statements that “all people on welfare or who are unemployed are lazy”, one needs to ask some questions. What about there being only 1 job out there today for every 5 applicants? What about our nation being in one of the worst recessions in decades? What about our unemployment rate still not going down but hovering around 9.8%?

More times than not, the first side is held up by privileged whites who haven’t had to worry about not receiving great education, health care, living in a stable home, or living in an impoverished neighborhood. Their existence is never questioned based on their races behavior on a macro level. They simply live without having their race drag them down. The second side can tend to be a mixed bag of colors. They may make up educated whites as well as those who have been or have known someone enrolled in a state program. The words of Andrew Marin, even though spoken about the divide between the church and the GLBT community, ring true in this case: “We have to go to a culture before we know a culture” (emphasis mine).

Back to taxes, how we construct our outlook on taxes and the economy in turn directs our allegiance towards a certain direction. Sure our personal experiences play in to that as well (Growing up, my Dad always complained about extra taxes coming his way. He was, and still is, a self employed landscaper, so extra taxes hit him and he feels them). If we see taxes towards the rich as a hindrance towards job creation, especially in a recession, we will say ‘no way’ to ending tax cuts. On the flip side, if we see tax cuts for the middle class as helpful for they are the ones who are more apt to spend on the basics (food, furniture, stimulating local business) than to save in large amounts, then one would say “sure, give those guys the tax cuts”.

As I said, in the end it comes down to the reality we construct. How much of that is based on actual reality (our experiences, empirical evidence) and based on faux theology (Mike Huckabee, Glenn Beck, Fox News), only ourselves can fully peer into that source.

Holiday Reading and Videos

I meant to post this last night. I ended up seeing the new Harry Potter movie (!). Any who, enjoy the reading and videos and the holiday weekend!

• If Sarah Palin was the POTUS, she would stand by our “North Korean allies“, well, because we are bound by a treaty. Note: she said this on Glenn Beck’s radio show.
• Don’t stop, believing, in robocop.
• Truly truly, thank God for these patriotic millionaires.
• A data backed reasoning for not watching cable TV.
• Barack Obama on 60 minutes.
• Some complete DADT irrationality for your day.
• And finally, Harry and Hermione dance away the woes of having the world on their shoulders:
  

Patriotism as a Form of Socialism

I chucked a bit last night after reading this. I believe it has some truth to it.

You can think of patriotism as a kind of status socialism—a collectivization of the means of self-esteem production. You don’t have to graduate from an Ivy or make a lot of money to feel proud or special about being an American; you don’t have to do a damn thing but be born here. Cultural valorization of “American-ness” relative to other status markers, then, is a kind of redistribution of psychological capital to those who lack other sources of it.You can gin up bogus reasons why it might matter from a policy perspective when the president says something that can be construed as “apologizing for America,” or doesn’t engage in a lot of symbolism that’s supposed to signal commitment to “American values”—but none of them have ever made much sense. The conventional take is that it’s really about markers of tribal affinity, but we can go a step further: Maybe it’s more precisely that people want high-status figures to invest in building the brand of their shared identity—a sort of status redistribution as noblese oblige.

Patriotism relies on banding together, spreading the red, white, and blue goodness around and labeling anyone who questions it either a commie, terrorist sympathizer, or an antichrist. Sure, this form of socialism isn’t redistributing money and lead by a Soviet dictator, but I wouldn’t put Joseph Stalin on completely different planets as Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin. When you have a Representative in the state of Minnesota saying that not all cultures are equal and further draws the line between American and foreign, clean and unclean in a sense, that takes anyone listening or riding that wave down a inhumane and perilous path to harming self, nation (so much for national security, eh?) and maybe most importantly: others!

God, Gold, and Guns: A Mormon Innuendo?

I chatted with my Mom the other day. Her and I talk often about her husband, my dad. He is a self employed landscaper whose career, finances, and every day to day nuance revolve around the weather. That subsequently brings him to listen to the weather constantly. He has had his fair share of ‘moments’ preparing for torrential rain fall or a snow storm and ends up receiving no rain or just a dusting. I feel that being let down, for lack of a better phrase, which when it happens isn’t as bad as he may let on, spurs some fear.

Fear of what, you may wonder? Fear of the unknown. Fear of not being able to keep up with work. Fear of losing customers in the case of weather extremes. Fear of not being able to pay for his overhead costs or his workers. Fear of running out of hours in the week. Fear of losing money. Many other fears may factor in but those listed and others I couldn’t come up with are what I was presented with growing up in his house.

Back to talking to my Mom the other day. She said he was worried, which doesn’t surprise me nor is it unusual. Every year, like clock worth, he gets worried about not being able to finish his work on time for the family Thanksgiving trip. I asked if that was the worry but it wasn’t, or it hasn’t been vocalized yet. She said his worry was twofold wrapped together: two close friends of his said he should buy gold because of the value of the dollar and he should stock up on food because we are going to run out of food soon in America.

I have never understood the gold craze. As my Mom said, you can’t take your brick of gold in to the super market and buy groceries. She said she pressed my Dad for some details and he said his friend owns some gold. For him, there was a fee to buy the gold in addition to the cost of the gold in itself. There was even a fee to sell the gold in the end. My Mom asked my Dad the ironic question: do your friends own gold? His answer: no.

This transitioned into my Dad hearing from “his friends” that he should stockpile food in a pantry in case of some sort of apocalypse. My Mom and he already do that to a certain degree (they once had oatmeal for a good price at the Walmart near me in college and when he was in town, he bought at least 12 of them and wiped the shelves clean). My mom doesn’t fall for this wingnut crap, and me saying that about the general topic of food scarcity doesn’t mean I take the thought as poppycock but I do with the irrational fear mongering currently in some corners. I still asked her, for my Dads sake, to think about all of the Walmart’s (some the size of football fields, just stop and think about that), Targets, food stores, Dollar stores, Malls, restaurants, and other leisurely palaces when the thought comes up of us turning into a rationed Soviet Union devoid of food anytime soon. Take also into consideration the political walls that would need to be bulldozed to get there. Unfortunately, the rather radical, and definitely irrational, view of Barack Obama makes the notion of this food scarcity thought have a heart beat.

I instantly thought of two major themes in this conversation but my thoughts evolved afterwards when I talked to MJ. First, I thought about Glenn Beck and his Goldline endorsements.GB’s website warning ties this all in:

When the system eventually collapses, and the government comes with guns and confiscates, you know, everything in your home and all your possessions, and then you fight off the raving mad cannibalistic crowds that Ted Turner talked about, don’t come crying to me. I told you: get gold. (emphasis mine).

This all made me talk with MJ about GB and his normal (to me) fear mongering. She mentioned, as the studious girl she is with a major in religion, that the Church of Latter Day Saints is very focused on the end times and looking to understand the ‘signs of the times‘.

After reading a chunk of that, a light bulb clicked on in my head. I only wonder if the masses who listen to Glenn Beck, some avowed Christians and some not, know he is possibly spewing Mormon innuendo’s of the end times. I emphasize the word ‘possibly’ because I haven’t done, in my opinion, enough digging to back that up. Another part of that requires GB to say something personally about this regarding his views, which if he doesn’t then I will never know the full extent this.

In the end, I find that possibility intriguing. This one, too, which just so happens to be connected to him, is also intriguing. And while I am at it, Jon Stewart does what he does best with the Glenn Beck / Goldline love affair.