Glenn Beck continued his pattern of finding proto-Hitlers everywhere he looks. President Obama is the next Hitler for wanting to give health care to those who don’t have it — because, as everyone knows, Hitler began his campaign to exterminate the Jews by giving them health insurance. Even empathy leads to Hitler. And this time, the winner is — spins the wheel — the Wall Street protesters.
This is one of the more amusing event announcements you’ll see for a while.
Join FM NewsTalk 97.1 as two of our country’s leading conservative standard bearers share the same stage. Sarah Palin first made history on December 4, 2006 when she was sworn in as the first female governor of Alaska. In August 2008, Senator John McCain tapped her to serve as his vice-presidential running mate in his presidential campaign, making her the first woman to run on the Republican Party’s presidential ticket.
It seems the rampant rumors were true, Fox has canceled Glenn Beck’s show on the network. They tried to put a happy spin on it by saying that he’s now going to create more shows for them, and he said that it’s only ending because he has other things to do, but I think it’s pretty obvious that Fox is cutting the show loose because, despite still relatively good ratings, they can’t make all that much money with it.
At its peak, his show had more than 3 million viewers a night. It still has close to 2 million. The fact that they were still having to show Goldline commercials rather than really lucrative spots from major sponsors suggests that they weren’t making nearly the money on a show of that popularity as they should have been able to just based on the viewership numbers.
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The bombing of Libya presents a real problem for those conservatives who care nothing about intellectual honesty or consistency. On the one hand, you know damn well they would cheer on any Republican president who took such action against Ghadafi. On the other hand, they want to criticize Obama no matter what he does.
Glenn Beck has solved this problem. He simply criticizes Obama for bombing and for not bombing Libya — within about a 30 second span.
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Glenn Beck gave a truly bizarre, vaguely scary and totally incoherent little rant about the earthquake in Japan on his radio show earlier this week. He tied the earthquake to Jesus possibly returning, to Hezbollah and Muslims in America and to our personal moral behavior — all while claiming he wasn’t really claiming that, but he kind of was, and there’s a lesson in all of this vague mush of non-claims.
Conor Friedersdorf responds to the recent bashing of Glenn Beck by some prominent conservatives, pointing out that while Beck surely deserves the criticism, so do lots of other voices on the right. He quotes Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post:
“What should thoughtful conservatives do? I’ve said it before, but it is especially relevant here: Police their own side,” she advised this week. “Rather than reflexively rising to his defense when questioned about Beck, why don’t conservatives call him out and explain that he doesn’t represent the views of mainstream conservatives? Conservative groups and candidates should be forewarned: If they host, appear with or defend him they should be prepared to have his extremist views affixed to them.”
In one of his most bizarre diatribes yet, Glenn Beck says that Reform Judaism is just like radical Islam in being highly politicized.
When you talk about rabbis, understand that most — most people who are not Jewish don’t understand that there are the Orthodox rabbis, and then there are the reformed rabbis. Reformed rabbis are generally political in nature. It’s almost like Islam, radicalized Islam in a way, to where it is just — radicalized Islam is less about religion than it is about politics.
Glenn Beck’s latest bit of crazy is to claim that the teacher’s unions protesting in Wisconsin are working in league with the Muslim Brotherhood to bring about one world government. No, seriously.
Bill Kristol criticizes Glenn Beck. Glenn Beck goes after Bill Kristol. And Conor Friedersdorf has the perfect response:
What an interesting feud. Both men are willing to use the ugliest kinds of propagandistic nonsense as a cudgel against ideological adversaries. The ironic result is that in their current contretemps, each is capable of landing devastating blows merely by pointing to indefensible stuff the other has actually said in the past.
And I’m left wondering who to root for.
The Worldnutdaily notes that many Glenn Beck fans are inundating him with comments on his website disputing his dismissal of their birther nonsense.
Glenn Beck may pooh-pooh the issue of Barack Obama’s eligibility based on his qualifications – or lack thereof – as a “natural born citizen” as the Constitution requires of a president, and has on his show made that clear a number of times.
But some of his most loyal fans are emphatic in demanding, “Where’s the Birth Certificate?”
On Beck’s own website, a thread started today shows those concerned over Obama’s unwillingness to provide documentation that shows his eligibility running 9-to-one over those who believe the issue is a non-issue.
As crazy as Beck is, his fans are even worse.
Glenn Beck may have come out and said he’s not concerned about same-sex marriage, but he certainly has surrounded himself with some of the more extreme anti-gay bigots around. That’s hardly surprising given that his primary target audience is right-wing Christians.
It’s interesting to see the disparity in reactions on this. Some, like Joseph Farah and the Worldnutdaily, have reacted very negatively to Beck’s more libertarian position on gay marriage. Others, like those still working with him, don’t seem to care. Purity vs compromise is always a battle in such movements.
In the wake of Beckapalooza at the Lincoln Memorial, some pundits are arguing over the allegedly a-political nature of the event. Beck insisted time and time again that the event was not about politics or partisanship, but about instilling “American values.” Jonah Goldberg fell for it hook, line and sinker, calling the event “ecumenical” and celebrating its inclusiveness.
He could hardly be further from the truth. The rally was entirely about dividing us and them, the “faithful” from the heathen, the real patriots from those evil commies — i.e. Democrats — out to destroy America and God himself. Will Wilkinson punctures all this silliness about the notion that there is an American identity:
Dispatches From the Culture Wars
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