Elephant Dung #26: Glenn Beck calls Huckabee the worst thing possible... a progressive

Tracking the GOP Civil War

By R.K. Barry 

(For an explanation of this ongoing series, see here. For previous entries, see here.)

In Glenn Beck's vocabulary, there is no dirtier word than "progressive." All the villains in his warped understanding of history can be shown to carry this particular banner: Wilson, FDR, TR, LBJ, WJC, and, of course, the current occupant of the White House. Their shared sin is some variant of the claim that they use government to devise schemes that ultimately oppress the people. Nazis, Communists, New Dealers, Great Society advocates -- progressives each and every one. It's not very clear how it all works, and it usually involves a chalk board and diagrams, but that's the charm that is Mr. Glenn Beck.

Fascinatingly enough, he has recently taken to calling Mike Huckabee a progressive.

Judging from the audio clip you can access here, it seems that Huck started his slide when he supported Michelle's Obama's anti-obesity campaign. Go figure.

Many of us have been saying for some time that the radical right will get tired of simply going after liberals. At some point, which seems to be happening now, they will go after those putatively within their own ranks who they deem not pure enough -- not conservative enough.

Huckabee has a show on the Fox network, as had Beck until recently, so maybe this is a sort of parting shot at his old company. The truth is that for ideological purists like Beck and Tea Partiers no one is truly safe and everyone must be scrutinized, even as their own circle becomes smaller and smaller.

As I have said before, this is what has been called the tyranny of virtue.

Any willingness to believe that one's opponents might just have something to offer, that they might have something reasonable to say, that they might be of value as human beings, is proof of one's own unworthiness to continue on in the ranks of the anointed. You will recall that former Republican Florida Governor Charlie Crist was thrown overboard as a potential Senate nominee for having once hugged President Obama. Tough crowd.

We see this with the Tea Party v. the Republican leadership. And now Glenn Beck, the high priest of the conservative revolution, has just banished one who the rest of us thought was among the elect.

The only question now is, who's next?

(Cross-posted to Lippmann's Ghost.)

Why did Fox News fire Glenn Beck?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Because, let's face it, a firing it was, despite the happy-talk press release announcing that Fox News and Mercury Radio Arts, Beck's production company, will continue to "work together to develop and produce a variety of television projects for air on the Fox News Channel as well as content for other platforms including Fox News' digital properties."

So why was he fired? Declining ratings? Concern that Beck would make Republicans look really bad heading into 2012? Recognition that he's a loose cannon and not exactly a team player? Embarrassment among the rank and file, if not throughout the entire organization?

Does it matter? Do we care?

Normally, I'd turn this over to R.K. Barry, our resident Beckologist, but from what I understand he seriously injured himself yesterday doing a series of backflips upon hearing the news. Initial reports that it was his groin seem to have been overblown. I suspect it's his back and that he's now on some serious meds.

Can you blame him? We won't have Glenn Beck to kick around anymore. Well, not really. He'll be around, but his days as an unavoidable right-wing media personality are probably over.

Then again, it's fun to kick Glenn Beck around, and, yes, he did make Fox News and everything else on the right look bad. And he's been great for business, the business of those of us who oppose him and everything he stands for.

And we won't have Jon Stewart doing Glenn Beck, which he's doing right now, as I type. Hilarious stuff. (Ah, Jon just said he's been good for business, too! I suppose a lot of us are saying that.)

I'm tempted to say that his firing/departure will be good for America, and for American political and cultural discourse, but of course he's only departing his daily show at Fox News. He'll still be on the radio, and he'll still have his legions of followers (even if most of them are old).

But I do think we ought to celebrate his firing. As Alexander Zaitchik, author of Common Nonsense, puts it (quoted by Weigel):

Moving forward, I see him turning into a sort of hybrid-figure, part Limbaugh, part Breitbart, part Pat Robertson, maybe a little Ben Stein on the documentaries front. But it's hard to avoid the conclusion that his days as a heavy, constant presence in the mainstream conversation are over. Whatever media shape-shift he's about to perform post-Fox, he's a greatly diminished national presence for those who aren't "Insider Extreme" members at glennbeck.com. Which is a blessed, blessed thing.

Indeed it is.

Glenn Beck uncovers new evidence of worldwide leftist conspiracy

By R.K. Barry

Yes, it appears that even Little Bunny Foo Foo is conspiring with Google to take over the world. When will this madness end?

All together now!

Beck goes bonkers: Communism is coming to the U.S.

By Nicholas Wilbur

Glenn Beck is worried. Not quite trembling, and not yet so crazy that he's barking at squirrels, but worried. The uprising in Egypt marks the beginning of the end. Communists and Islamic extremists are mounting an offensive against the Western world.

As proof of this "communist revolt," Beck cited a story in The New York Times:

This is what I've been called nuts for for the last two weeks. And basically, it's on the front page story, "Wired and Shrewd, Young Egyptians Guide Revolt," and what it talks about is how the Islamic extremists have gotten together with socialists and communists and they have sown the seeds of revolt.

It goes without saying that people who watch Beck's show on Fox News aren't big fans of The New York Times. Probably many of his fans (literally, fanatics) were offended by Beck's reliance on the unpatriotic, anti-American, and undeniably traitorous manifesto as evidence of this "insurrection" heading to the United States.

In the interests of context, I have lifted the following passages from the above-referenced news article, which Beck cites as proof of a communist-socialist-Islamic extremist movement:

• They are the young professionals, mostly doctors and lawyers, who touched off and then guided the revolt shaking Egypt, members of the Facebook generation who have remained mostly faceless — very deliberately so, given the threat of arrest or abduction by the secret police.

• In the process many have formed some unusual bonds that reflect the singularly non-ideological character of the Egyptian youth revolt, which encompasses liberals, socialists and members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

• Islam Lotfi, a lawyer who is a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood Youth, said his group used to enlist others from the tiny leftist parties to stand with them in calling for civil liberties, to make their cause seem more universal. Many are now allies in the revolt, including Zyad el-Elaimy, a 30-year-old lawyer who was then the leader of a communist group.

Mr. Elaimy, who was imprisoned four times and suffered multiple broken limbs from torture for his political work, now works as an assistant to Mohamed ElBaradei, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work with the International Atomic Energy Agency. In turn, his group built ties to other young organizers....

• Most of the group are liberals or leftists, and all, including the Brotherhood members among them, say they aspire to a Western-style constitutional democracy where civic institutions are stronger than individuals.

But they also acknowledge deep divides, especially over the role of Islam in public life. Mr. Lotfi points to pluralistic Turkey. On the question of alcohol — forbidden by Islam — he suggested that drinking was a private matter but that perhaps it should be forbidden in public.

Asked if he could imagine an Egyptian president who was a Christian woman, he paused. "If it is a government of institutions," he said, "I don't care if the president is a monkey."

Okay, so to be clear there are, as Beck professes, communists, socialists, and members of the Muslim Brotherhood behind the organized rallies that, as of February 11, 2010, successfully overthrew an oppressive and corrupt dictator in Egypt.

But as the article clearly shows, these are not anarchists, radicals, or extremist Muslims aspiring for some new world order run by a fundamentalist Caliphate, as Beck believes. They are college-educated professionals, "mostly doctors and lawyers" (one of whom is Wael Ghonim, "a Google executive who was detained for 12 days but emerged this week as the movement's most potent spokesman") who were "born roughly around the time that President Hosni Mubarak first came to power... and [who] all have spent their adult lives bridling at the restrictions of the Egyptian police state – some undergoing repeated arrests and torture for the cause." Their cause being "a Western-style constitutional democracy."

If, as Beck claims, there are "communist revolutionaries who are willing to band with anyone here in America" and who are ready to spread their "cause" across the world, then America better brace for its own revolution. "It will come to America," according to Beck.

Grab your tinfoil helmets, pull out your Bibles, and sharpen your bayonets, folks. A "Western-style constitutional democracy" is heading this way.

(Cross-posted at Muddy Politics.)

Elephant Dung #13: Beck and Kristol trade insults over Egypt

Tracking the GOP Civil War

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(For an explanation of this ongoing series, see here. For previous entries, see here.)

The right has had a hard time figuring out where to stand on the situation in Egypt.

Or, rather, it has had a hard time coming up with a unified position, simply because there isn't one, what with some conservatives backing Mubarak (and U.S.-friendly dictatorships generally), some of them because they support Israel no matter what and Israel backs Mubarak, others lashing out against Islam as the great threat to America and asserting, without a shred of convincing evidence (the Muslim Brotherhood is not evidence), that the pro-democracy movement in Egypt is basically Iran-style Islamism, others, on the other side, still buying into Bush's democracy-promotion agenda and approving the prospect of change in Cairo.

Conservatives like to stick together. You know, like with "taxes are bad," "abortion is wrong," etc. The Iraq War ultimately exposed huge fault lines on the right. And now, with Egypt, conservatives are actually coming to blows, including two of the most prominent, Krazy Bill Kristol and even crazier Glenn Beck:

Fox News's Glenn Beck lashed out at Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol on his radio show this morning, accusing Kristol of betraying conservatism and missing the significance of what Beck sees as an alliance between Islamism and socialism.

"I don't even know if you understand what conservatives are anymore, Billy," Beck said in his extended, sarcastic attack on Kristol. "People like Bill Kristol, I don't think they stand for anything any more. All they stand for is power. They'll do anything to keep their little fiefdom together, and they'll do anything to keep the Republican power entrenched."

Kristol this weekend took Beck to task for the latter's skepticism of the Egyptian uprising:

When Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left, he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. He's marginalizing himself, just as his predecessors did back in the early 1960s.

Kristol's words drew an approving nod from National Review's Rich Lowry, a rare public repudiation of the influential Fox host from a conservative elite that quietly dislikes him. 

And all this at the time of the Reagan birth centennial. What was that about some 11th commandment?

Now, there's really no contest between Kristol and Beck. Kristol's a smart guy who often knows what he's talking about, while Beck is paranoid and insane. And Kristol is right that Beck is "marginalizing himself" with this conspiracy-theory nonsense. It's good to see that Kristol, a vicious Republican operative who has never shied away from spewing nonsensical and utterly ridiculous talking points, isn't even pretending to play along with Beck.

But, you know, Beck is sort of right, too, isn't he? I mean, Kristol may talk principle but he's really all about power, about getting Republicans elected and keeping them there. Think back to the '90s, when he was the source of the Republican opposition to "Hillarycare," all because he didn't want Bill Clinton to have a victory on a key, and historic, social policy issue.

And yet Kristol isn't necessary all about power. He isolated himself in 2000, for example, with his support for the renegade John McCain and he has certainly spent much of his career in Washington, and inside Republican circles, pushing a specific neocon agenda, specifically around a neocon view of American global hegemony. That's about power, too, but national rather than personal, and I suppose Kristol has at times been willing to run counter to the prevailing winds in the Republican Party, even if, in public at least, he is generally a good team player.

Anyway, it's fun to see these two go after each other. And yet it's not just about two prominent conservatives trading insults, it's about a serious divide on the right, with Republicans unable to land on a coherent message, let alone one they can all agree with.

The situation in Egypt will slowly drift away from American consciousness and will likely have no play at all in next year's Republican primaries, but this divide and others will remain, and deepen, and Republicans, divided against themselves, might just unravel into all-out civil war.

Enjoy.

Glenn Beck is crazy, but he's one of the Democrats' best friends

By R.K. Barry

I usually get home around six and almost immediately turn on MSNBC and pretty much keep it on as background noise through most of the evening. If you watch MSNBC with any regularity, you will know that show after show presents the day's political events from a relatively mild liberal-left perspective – at least from my point of view. 

Lawrence O'Donnell, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, etc. are on the roster. If there is one thing I wish they would do it's compare notes a little bit better because it seems that night after night they all cover pretty much the same stuff. Now, I know when world-changing events such as are happening in Egypt occur, it's impossible for any political pundit to refrain from commenting and that's fine.

But last week, on one given night, every single show did a little rant on Glenn Beck's recent fearmongering, conspiracy-theory claim that the events in Egypt are prelude to a generalized takeover by Muslim extremists in all parts of the Middle East as well as Europe and, who knows, even perhaps the United States. His claim is typically supported by an argument that radical socialists and communists will make common cause with radical Muslims because, as he argues, they have a common enemy – capitalism and freedom-loving people everywhere.

Having said all of that, I must also quickly say that I don't give a fuck what Glenn Beck thinks, though apparently a lot of people who reject his views still seem pretty focused on them.

What I struggle with is the extent to which I should pay any attention to this fool at all. More often than I can say I have either written or otherwise commented that I no longer want to write about or think about Glenn Beck. But here I am again.

When his lies and idiotic theories put the life of a hard-working, civic-minded, academic in jeopardy, simply because she is on the left, in the same way that a lot of us are, we have to call him out. This is just dangerous nonsense and we have to address it. I am of course referring to what he has been doing to City University of New York professor Frances Fox Piven, which you can read more about here.

But typically what he goes on about is so stupid and without any intellectual value that I want to ignore it. Then I think about the impact that he and Rush Limbaugh and others on the radical right are having on our national debate and have to rethink my willingness to call it fringe behavior unworthy of attention.

We do notice that Republican politicians are loathe to criticize Beck and Limbaugh and others, knowing that, if they do, those who watch such programming and are influenced by it are highly motivated and inclined to punish at the polls anyone who attempts to challenge the passionately held, albeit nutty, views espoused by these guys.

And this is the point. Right-wing extremism in the media, through the power of a focused and unrelenting message and the reach of media conglomerates, has by now a pretty good track record of motivating a significant segment of the conservative base to influence nominations and general elections. But as we also know, the outcome has not always been a happy one for the conservative side.

The reason for their mixed success is that so much of politics, especially in nomination contests, happens at the margins. Nomination contests are frequently about motivating true believers to care about yet another layer of political contest, which is where extremism can flourish.

This is why we end up with incompetent and unsuccessful candidates like former Republican Senate nominees Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell. This is why Sarah Palin can say any number of really stupid things and the Republican establishment has to pick its spots very carefully if it wants to criticize her. Establishment Republican candidates don't want to piss off those who are likely to be motivated enough to get involved in nomination battles, either as activists or voters. I don't know what percentage of the Republican base this characterizes. I don't know what percentage would be unhappy hearing their media heroes criticized by potential Republican candidates. Is it 5%, 10%, 15%? Whatever it is, it would be a big number in politics.

In politics, highly engaged voters at the margins are key. You need to keep them motivated, whether that motivation is about anger or about hope for a new future. They have a disproportionately important role to play in determining who gets to run in the general election. 

So, yes, I do resolve to pay limited attention to Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and the other right-wing crazies on the merits of their arguments, which, frankly, have no merit. But we should have no doubt that they are masters at stoking a certain kind of American political paranoia that has been with us for a long time, and let us at least give them their due for that.

A lot of people are saying that Beck has jumped the shark with his latest ramblings about Egypt. Maybe. For me, he's jumped so many sharks I've stopped counting.

I do think, however, that there is a bad moon rising for the Republicans as we head towards the 2012 elections, based on the dynamic put in play by the radical right and their cheerleaders on national television and radio.

Weak Republican candidates will continue to get nominated based in part on the passion of those on the margins who are driven by Beck and company. Republican presidential nominees will have to play to this constituency if they hope to secure the nomination, which almost surely guarantees their failure in the general election. There just aren't that many crazy people out there.

So there, I've talking myself into a changed position. Let's keep on talking about Glenn Beck. Let's help get his audience all excited and out of control. It can only help remind the sane part of the American electorate that they are not like Beck and those who take him seriously, that they are better than that.

I guess I also think that MSNBC should continue to go for it when it comes to Beck. But don't just do it in that way that you usually do, by mugging for the camera as he says one silly thing after another. That is just not that useful. No, I would challenge every responsible media outlet to ask every credible Republican nominee for office if they will disavow the crap spewed by Beck and Limbaugh. Force them to try to play the fringe of their own party against its vital center and then wish them good luck with that.

It's a little bit like House Speaker John Boehner being unwilling to criticize birthers in his own caucus.

Let us resolve, then, to make every Republican candidate wear the foolishness coming out of all those televisions and radios as Democrats march on to success in 2012. Seems like a plan.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

Good riddance, Mubarak. The Egyptian people demand to be free.

By Michael J.W. Stickings

With a popular, pro-democratic uprising in full swing, and with their economy facing disaster, Egyptians took to the streets in huge numbers today in Cairo. In a country ruled for decades by a brutal authoritarian tyrant, it was simply extraordinary. The outcome of the uprising has been unclear, but change seemingly was at hand.

And then it came.

With the writing on the wall, President Hosni Mubarak, who has lost both popular and military support, finally announced that he would not stand for re-election -- not that Egyptian elections under Mubarak are free and fair:

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has said he will not stand for re-election in September, as protests against his rule grow.

Speaking on state TV, Mr Mubarak promised constitutional reform, but said he wanted to stay until the end of his current presidential term.

The announcement came as hundreds of thousands rallied in central Cairo urging him to step down immediately.

US President Barack Obama said that Egypt's transition "must begin now".

As indeed it must. For while the American right is responding to the situation in Egypt with pro-Mubarak and therefore pro-tyranny paranoia, claiming that opposition leader Mohammed El Baradei is an Islamist and that, without Mubarak, the country will be taken over by the Muslim Brotherhood (which it misrepresents), there is good reason to believe that Egypt -- a relatively modern, secular state -- will emerge from this "crisis" with a moderately progressive government committed to liberty and democracy.

Glenn Beck may object to that, and so may the extremist pro-Israeli neocons, but the Egyptian people, having lived through decades of oppression, have every right to remake their country as they see fit, particularly if the future they envision is one that any liberal democrat should be able to embrace. (For the right, this is the usual hypocrisy. They talk up democracy in Iraq, emerging from a war they started, but Egypt must remain under a tyrannical yoke because they'd prefer to have a strongman in power there?)

President Obama was "clearly frustrated by... Mubarak's intention to retain his hold on power until elections later this year," as the WaPo puts it, but, as I have argued before, he deserves enormous credit for handling the situation so well. Without appearing to be too interventionist, given the delicate relationship the U.S. has both with Egypt and its neighbours in the Middle East, he carefully indicated U.S. support for the opposition, and for reform, and pushed Mubarak to leave:

In brief remarks at the White House, Obama made no mention of Mubarak's announcement that he had decided not to stand for reelection. Instead, Obama said he had told the Egyptian president in a telephone call that this was a "moment of transformation" in Egypt and that "the status quo is not sustainable."

Obama's message appeared carefully calibrated to avoid publicly calling for Mubarak to stand down, while making clear he should stand aside. Administration officials say they are seeking a transitional government, with or without Mubarak as its titular head, formed by representative reform leaders and backed by the Egyptian army that will address legitimate grievances, restore stability and plan for a free election. 

As the NYT notes, Obama sent an experienced envoy to Egypt on Sunday, former diplomat Frank Wisner, to urge Mubarak to step aside:

At a two-hour meeting at the White House last Saturday, Thomas E. Donilon, the national security adviser; William M. Daley, the White House chief of staff, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon E. Panetta; and other officials coalesced around a strategy to start trying to ease Mr. Mubarak out, an official said.

Mrs. Clinton, officials said, suggested that the administration send Mr. Wisner, a former ambassador to Egypt who knows Mr. Mubarak well, to deliver a message directly from Mr. Obama to the Egyptian leader. Officials said Mr. Wisner urged Mr. Mubarak to declare publicly that he would not run for re-election. But Mr. Wisner has extended his stay in Cairo, officials said, and may have a follow-up meeting with Mr. Mubarak if events seem to demand a quicker exit.

At the Saturday meeting, the officials also agreed that Mrs. Clinton would start calling for "an orderly transition" when she taped a round of interviews for the Sunday talk programs. Administration officials were already smarting from not coming out more fully in support of the protesters earlier.

Yes, Obama and others in his administration could have voiced their support for the opposition sooner, but, again, there was a need to proceed with caution, not least because the situation was so unclear, and remains so, and because, like it or not, Mubarak has been an important U.S. ally for a long time. What was needed was for the president to monitor the situation closely and then act, on little notice, when appropriate. He did that, and it seems to me he did it exceptionally well.

And so while conservatives lash out against those courageous Egyptians taking to the streets to shake off the yoke of oppression, and place themselves decidedly on the wrong side of history, Obama emerges from this situation -- which, admittedly, is still not over -- with his statesmanship strengthened.

But back to Egypt.

History is being made on the streets of Cairo and throughout the country. What we are witnessing is the force of freedom rising up against tyranny. It is a proud moment for Egypt, and those of us who genuinely wish well for the Egyptian people should applaud what is happening.

(photos)

Glenn Beck's continuing obsession with Professor Frances Fox Piven and the roots of violence in America

By R.K. Barry

Several months ago I published a post about Glenn Beck's obsession with City University of New York Professor Frances Fox Piven. I talked about having met her briefly in the early '80s in a grad course and about what a wonderful experience that was.

Mostly I wrote about how Beck, and those inclined to buy into his hateful message, can't stand anyone who helps poor people be heard or helps them make a legitimate claim to a decent life in America. I wrote about how Piven's career has been largely dedicated to helping us understand marginalized people and helping them help themselves, and that for this sin Beck was using the full weight of Fox News to vilify her.

Such was the nature of the bile directed at Professor Piven by Beck that it was clear that she would become a target for those misguided sorts who take Beck seriously, which is precisely what is starting to happen.

At the time I felt a bit like I was shouting in the wilderness, as few others seemed to be speaking out about this.

I was therefore pleased to see the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) get involved by writing a letter to Fox News directly to encourage the network to intervene.

In a press release dated January 20, 2011 about the letter, the CCR stated that it has:

issued a written appeal to Fox News president Roger Ailes to help put a stop to the increasing threats against progressive Professor Frances Fox Piven, largely incited by Fox News host Glenn Beck. In the letter, co-written by Legal Director Bill Quigley and Executive Director Vince Warren the CCR asks that Ailes distinguish between First Amendment rights, of which they are "vigorous defenders" and an "intentional repetition of provocative, incendiary, emotional misinformation and falsehoods [that place that person] in actual physical danger of a violent response."

The release goes on to say:

Beginning in September 2010, Glenn Beck started branding Piven, a distinguished professor of Political Science and Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, as an "enemy of the Constitution." Piven, well-known for advocating for the organizational rights of the poor and encouraging voter registration, has since received threatening phone calls and letters, and has become the subject of many death threats left open to the public on Glenn Beck's website, The Blaze.

Much as it sickens me to repeat some of the threats here, people need to know what we are up against. Here are just a few that appeared on Beck's website:

-- "Maybe they should burst through the front door of this arrogant elitist and slit the hateful cow's throat."

-- "We should blow up Piven's office and home."

-- "Big lots is having a rope sale I hear, you buy the rope and I will hang the wench. I will spin her as she hangs."

Suffice to say, they are disgusting.

Unlike in Arizona, the connections are clear. Beck has picked a target and he is to blame for the violent responses that have followed.

Beck has been getting away with slandering Professor Piven the way he slanders everyone else: with lies and innuendo. He did to her what he does with everyone else with whom he disagrees: he called her an enemy of the state; in fact, he specifically called her an enemy of the Constitution, whatever that means.

I am so weary of pointing out that Beck is a monumental asshole who can only be taken seriously by other assholes. He panders to the worst in those either too stupid or too lazy to do their own research. He feeds people's fears by creating enemies for them, which is always the best way for people to feel good about themselves when they have limited options.

But, in truth, Beck is not that clever. What he is doing has been done successfully throughout history. Pick an enemy, any enemy. Tell lies about them. Get people to focus their energy and anger on hating the outsiders, which, as I said, makes them feel good about themselves, makes them feel a part of something larger and important, at least in the short term.

Entire nations have been built on this insidious in-group / out-group tactic.

As I wrote months ago, Professor Piven's "crime" is that she has been successful in pointing out serious shortcomings in the American experience, especially in the way it treats poor people. She does what people like Beck can't tolerate. She tells the truth and at the same time tells us that we have a lot of work to do if we are to make America the country we would like it to be. Beck peddles simple answers for simple minds. Get in the way of that and expect to be made an enemy of this self-righteous fool. Expect to be made a target.

This is hateful, despicable stuff, though Fox News has already said it will do nothing about it, as it serves its dual mandate of being a mouthpiece for the loony right in America and of making lots of money for Rupert Murdoch.

I have said this so often I am getting tired. We may not yet know fully what happened in Arizona, but what Beck is doing to Professor Piven is the clearest example of a problem about which many of us are so worried. Say that your political adversaries are enemies of the state. Imply that they must be stopped and then step back until some deranged bastard decides to take on the task – until some unbalanced nutjob decides that he can become a hero to the "in-group" created by Glenn Beck and those in his camp.

This is the point. It's already happening in America. What more has to happen before Fox News decides that there is too much of a downside to being associated with someone as disgusting as Glenn Beck? What precisely?

(Cross-posted from Lippmann's Ghost.)

How conservatives are deflecting responsibility for the Arizona shooting

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I've written it again and again, including earlier today: There may be no perfectly direct connection between conservatism and the Arizona shooting, but that does not necessarily mean that what Jared Lee Loughner did (or, rather, is charged with doing) may be detached entirely from the broader, right-wing political context that may very well have informed his thinking, or his derangement, to some degree. And while he is evidently not a card-carrying member of the Tea and/or Republican Party, it is wrong to treat him as a detached loner, as a victim of mental illness who acted purely in a vacuum of his own derangement. 

This is the case conservatives are making -- that Loughner is crazy -- and it's their way of avoiding any and all responsibility not just for the shooting itself but more broadly for constructing the socio-political context behind it.

For more on this, see David Dayen at FDL, who says what many of us have said, and keep saying, but that we need to keep saying, not least with the right, which has been on the defensive since the Arizona shooting, trying desperately to impose its responsibility-deflecting we didn't do anything, we're victims of a left-wing plot narrative:

Republicans have pulled off a neat trick with respect to Jared Loughner. They have worked very hard to characterize him as a "whacko" and a "nutjob" (inadvertently hurting the prospect of a successful prosecution, by the way), going so far as to use the shooting as an opportunity to revamp the nation’s mental health system. I'm all for that, but the ulterior motive from the right is to absolve themselves of blame and marginalize the voices talking about overheated political rhetoric.

Now, you don't have to believe that Sarah Palin purchased the gun for Loughner and whispered in his ear about targets to believe that the rhetoric on the far, far right played a role in amping up the paranoia of a mentally unbalanced man...

The more you read by Loughner, or the more videos you see from him, they reflect these beliefs very strongly. He mentions the Constitution, illegal laws, manipulated currency, government control through grammar, and on and on. It's quite hard to follow, and it's not organized coherently, but it comes from a fairly precise place.

It's not necessary for Loughner to even understand the derivations of these conspiracy theories, or to be of sound mind, to be influenced by them. But they come from a very toxic, militia-friendly, anti-government place, and over the past couple decades the distance between that perspective and the mainstream right has absolutely narrowed; see Glenn Beck. The Birchers, militia groups and Alex Jones conspiracy ranters will always be with us; an isolated few scientists argued in favor of a flat earth well into the 19th century. The point that many who study this make is that mainstreaming some of these conspiracies, like when Lou Dobbs puts the North American Union on television, or when Beck hosts a Bircher on his radio show or concocts some bizarre blackboard theory, it hypes up and leads to greater attention to the real nutters on the fringe. And in the hands of a troubled mind, these conspiracies can do real damage.

As they did in Oklahoma City, as they did in Arizona, and as they will continue to do so long as they are not only embraced by the right but "mainstreamed" right into the heart of the GOP.

Bigotry will destroy Glenn Beck before porn or paranoia

By Nicholas Wilbur

On a brisk Connecticut morning in November, Glenn Beck mastered the art of multitasking by simultaneously praying to God, reading from Psalms, and thinking (a difficult enough task unto itself) about all of the conspiracies his left-leaning critics might create in order to ruin his reputation, get him fired, and destroy the wonderful "fusion of entertainment and enlightenment" he provides to the American masses on television and radio every week.

Thinking aloud during a Nov. 12, 2010 radio program, the 46-year-old talk-show mogul explained that he is not into drinking or drugs (having overcome both addictions in his 30s thanks, in part, to Mormonism). Then he said this:

I—uhh—you know—I'm not—I'm not into ch—I'm not even into—I was going to say I'm not into child pornography. I'm not only not into child pornography, I'm not into pornography. I'm not into any of it.

If his critics hadn't previously thought to capitalize on Beck's real or imagined struggle with pornography, they did after he stuttered his way through this awkward on-air denial. Why diffuse arguments that aren't being argued? Why defend allegations that aren't being alleged? Why offer unsolicited defenses against invisible attackers?

Some might say he was covering his tracks and preparing his faithful, if ever-dwindling audience for an onslaught. Others might say Beck is a porn addict.

I say Beck is finally starting to believe all the fearmongering, the paranoid prattle and the anti-government right-wing conspiracies he spews daily on TV and radio.

As unfortunate as it may be for those who hoped and prayed that Beck had a kiddie porn dungeon in his multi-million-dollar mansion, it turns out that the Beck backlash has nothing to do with his allegedly non-existent porn addiction. His fall from radical right-wing grace will not come from personal problems but from the anti-Semitism, racism, and general bigotry from his own mouth.

From news reports last week:

Jewish Funds for Justice (JFSJ), a charity that campaigns for social change, delivered a petition with 10,000 signatures to Fox News Thursday demanding that talk show host Glenn Beck get the pink slip.

The petition began in November, according to PoliticsDaily.com, after Beck hosted a three-segment program on philanthropist George Soros, whom Beck accused of ushering fellow Jews into the gas chambers as a 13-year-old boy and stealing their land.

Beck also made headlines last week when New York's WOR (710 AM), "one of the city's two biggest talk radio stations" announced it was dropping Beck's program due to poor ratings.

And these are only the most recent efforts to undue Beck's chokehold on sanity.

The website StopBeck.com began in July 2009 as a non-profit effort to "(hold) Beck accountable for preying on racial anxieties, employing vitriolic rhetoric, propagating sexism and disseminating willful distortions."

The goal – to persuade sponsors to stop advertising on Beck's programs – has paid off. According to The New York Times, Beck has lost about 300 sponsors since StopBeck began:

His show now averages two million viewers, down from a high of 2.8 million in 2009, according to the Nielsen Ratings. And as of Sept. 21, 296 advertisers have asked that their commercials not be shown on Beck's show (up from 26 in August 2009).

The Nielsen ratings for 2010 put Beck at 2,248,000 average viewers, but StopBeck has continued contacting sponsors directly and requesting that they discontinue their financial support of the vitriol Beck contributes to the national dialogue.

According to a Jan. 10, 2011, update, Beck's United Kingdom program has been running without ads for nearly 11 months because of these efforts.

Beck's conspiracy theory of how progressives are trying to ruin his reputation and "take him out" with a smear campaign on his character have proven mere products of his own paranoia. Devotees of the self-described "progressive hunter" should rest assured there is no such pornography conspiracy, although it is possible that one is in the works considering the prevalence of the subject in Beck's broadcasts.

This is the guy, after all, who coined the terms "common-sense porn," "conservative porn," and "Chris Christie porn" after frothing at the mouth over the New Jersey governor's rant against the education system and the prevalence of bad teachers.

This is the guy who acted out a potentially Oscar-winning orgasm on live radio after airing a clip on Sept. 4, 2008 of Sarah Palin, who was railing against the evil emperor of the Senate, Harry Reid:

Yes! Yes! Stop for a second. When she started to say this stuff, man, it was downright – it was conservative porn. This is as close as you get, yeah, thank you. Thank you! Oh, yeah. Now play the rest of that clip.

In a repeat performance on May 24, 2010, Beck once again came close to staining his Jesus jammies during an interview with Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly, during which O'Reilly was offering some rather flattering feedback about Beck's occasionally accurate political hunches:

Keep talking, man. This is like porn to me... This is like Bill O'Reilly porn. Keep talking, Bill, keep talking.

This is the guy who titled the transcript of his Jan. 8, 2009 radio program, "Porn, yes... NYT no," and asked, "What's the difference between porn and The New York Times? I don't think there's any difference. Tell me, you read The New York Times; you read pornography. You feel dirty after doing both, don't you?"

Those who have experienced the wholly encompassing power of addiction know how easy it is to fall back into it. Beck is one such person, having struggled with and successfully overcome alcohol and drug addictions earlier in his career. So when Playboy magazine published an opinion column titled, "Why Glenn Beck is a Symptom of What is Wrong with America" in its November 2009 edition, it was not surprising that the rightly-guided Beck wouldn't even look at it – wouldn't even read the "hit piece" against him – for fear of the wandering eye and the successive gateway drug-like plunge into the depths of a (repeat?) pornography addiction.

He gave a quite vivid, even heartfelt description of how "deadly" porn addiction can be:

It's no longer like it's a magazine that comes, it's now the Internet and it's just a wormhole and you just start going down into this wormhole and you don't get out and before you know it, you know, the husband is downstairs at 2:00 in the morning spending, you know, a couple of hours online and then the whole relationship with the family just changes. And before you and it just gets worse and worse and worse. It's really dangerous stuff.

This is also the guy who described the TSA machines at airports as "porn scanners":

The enhanced patdown was created as an alternative option to the porn scanner. Remember a few weeks ago, none of us wanted to go through the porn scanner. So they decided, well you don't have to do that. We'll pat you down. You get the porn scanner or you get felt up.

This is the guy who mused during a March 8, 2010 program, "I don't know if I bought kiddie porn or what's going to happen now, but it was a great movie." He was talking about the Roman Polanski film, The Ghost Writer.

And this is the guy who, as recently as Jan. 13, 2011, couldn't help including porn stars in his letter to Americans after the Tucson shooting.

I challenge all Americans, left or right, regardless if you're a politician, pundit, painter, priest, parishioner, poet or porn star to... denounce violence...

All of this is to say that Beck doesn't have, never has had, and never will have any sort of obsession with or addiction to pornography.

To insinuate that he does is cheap, baseless, and dishonest – because everyone knows bigotry will destroy the Beck legacy long before pornography does.

(Cross-posted from Muddy Politics.)

Glenn Beck: Lies and the manufacturing of paranoia

By R.K. Barry

I hate thinking about Glenn Beck. I hate watching him on television. I hate reading his crap on the web. I hate writing about him. But the truth is that he is such a perfect example of everything that is wrong with the right in America that it is impossble to ignore him, despite the fact that he continues to be an idiot.

Many have been making the point that those on the right railing about the extent to which Obama and progressives want to destroy America run the very serious risk of making their political opponents targets of violence. Beck and others so consistently make the absurd claim that Obama and his political allies have a plan to take away our freedom, our money, our guns, our very way of life, you name it. They work so hard to create a wildly paranoid right-wing culture and then claim surprise that people might respond irrationally.

I wrote about this a few days ago, but I notice that Harold Meyerson of The Washington Post makes a similar case and expands the argument in useful directions. Please take a few moments to read it.

It doesn't matter if this is what happened in Arizona. If it isn't, it will happen soon enough somewhere else if these bastards continue on this path. (Oh, sorry. Was I being disagreeable while disagreeing?)

Beck's duplicity and hypocrisy know no bounds and I am getting tired of stating the obvious. But as long as he and others like him continue to lie about their political opponents and deny the consequences of such lies, let us have the strength to challenge them, every day if necessary.

And, by the way, the poison is in the lies that feed paranoia, not the excitable tone or unpleasant character of the words used by the speaker. That is what should concern us. The target symbols and talk of second amendment remedies or of locking and loading are really only an issue because of the lies that manufacture such paranoia.

So we are left talking about rudeness as if that were the point. It's not.

Anyway, have a look at the Meyerson piece. It says it all for me.

(Cross-posted to Lippmann's Ghost)

"You can't outsmart crazy"

By Edward Copeland

With those words, Jon Stewart gave another eloquent speech at the beginning of Monday night's Daily Show, dispensing with humor to address Saturday's horrific events in Tucson.

With each passing hour and day since alleged gunman Jared Lee Loughner opened fire on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, critically injuring her, killing six and wounding 14 others, it becomes clearer that this 22-year-old man was not a political partisan but someone who was severely mentally ill. With Arizona government offices finally open Monday, The Washington Post finally was able to answer one simple question that's not open to debate: his voter registration. The answer turns out to be that he was a registered independent but was considered inactive because he hadn't bothered to vote in such a long time, including in November. Hardly indicative of a Tea Party participant.

I am guilty of jumping to conclusions. With the precursors without body counts such as smashed windows, threats, cut gas lines, it was an easy assumption to make. However, in my horror of the moment I forgot the old line about what happens when you assume: it makes an ass out of u and me. Subconsciously, there probably was part of me as there consciously was in many others who wanted this tragedy to turn out to be that way for political advantage. I may disagree with the Tea Party, believe them to be terribly misinformed and inflamed by the likes of Glenn Beck, but they aren't all homicidal lunatics.

When so many on the left criticized Jon Stewart's rally, claiming he was trying to make both sides equivalent, in the wake of Saturday's events, now he seems more right than ever. Keith Olbermann's Saturday special comment didn't say so explicitly, but if you read between the lines, it was a bit of a mea culpa for his own role. As Sarah Palin rushed to delete her graphic with the gunsight over Giffords' district, Daily Kos also had to delete a post where one of Giffords' constituents said that Giffords was "dead to me" because she voted against Nancy Pelosi for House minority leader.

Already, both sides are starting to revert to old habits. Because we on the left rushed to link the act of a madman to the politics of those we oppose, now those on the right revert to defensive mode and attack us. Hopefully, someone can stop this quickly. This is an opportunity for everyone to step back, take a breath and restore civility to the political process. I'm not saying compromise your principles, but it's long past time where both sides stop treating political opponents as the enemy. As it's been said many times, you can disagree without being disagreeable. The political climate probably didn't set Loughner off, but both parties need to look at themselves critically and seriously.

I hope that people take Pima County, Ariz., Sheriff Clarence Gupnik to heart and start rejecting the Becks and Limbaughs, but the only way that happens is when they get hit where it really hurts: the wallet. Beck has shown those signs with the loss of lots of sponsors, being taken off a big New York radio station and even dropping numbers on Fox News. I wish their listeners realized they were in it for the money, but oh well.

What really needs to be addressed seriously is the fact that this country has a gun problem and it's had a gun problem for a long time. A man rejected by the military, kicked out of college and who worried others around him was still allowed to legally purchase his Glock and, more importantly, his high-volume ammunition clips. He had three clips which had 33 rounds each. These sorts of clips were illegal under the assault weapons ban which was allowed to expire during the Bush Administration. If that law were still in place, he could only have purchased clips that held 10 rounds, meaning he would have to reload more frequently and the bloodshed would have been less. I hope the NRA and their friends in Congress are proud. Right now, Arizona is considering allowing faculty and college students to carry concealed weapons without a permit.

We also have to improve our ability to treat the mentally ill. In a rare moment of a television newsperson saying something profound, Lester Holt did the other day when he said that in the end, the motive doesn't matter. Six people are still dead, including a 9-year-old student council president born on 9/11.

Political violence in America: Let’s stop pretending we're shocked

By R.K. Barry 

I don't know. Is there anything that hasn't been said about Saturday's shooting in Arizona that left six dead and fourteen wounded, including Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords?

Some news coverage and partisan commentary has tried hard to place blame and draw connections or deflect blame and deny connections as the case may be.

It would have been better for progressives if the assailant were actually on a Tea Party group membership list or if he expressed his admiration for Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh in writings or other public statements. Maybe some of this kind of thing will be found. I doubt it.

It will of course be better for conservatives if little or nothing connecting the shooter to right-wing political ideology can be found. It will be better for them if information about him continues to pour in supporting the view that he is simply a sad and crazy young man.

In any case, at least for me, the motivation of this particular person is almost beside the point, much as we will go over and over it in the coming weeks.

What is more interesting is how many of our minds immediately drew the conclusion that this tragedy was the inevitable result of the pervasiveness of a kind of political speech through which we are currently suffering. It is the kind of speech that strongly suggests that those who disagree with the current conservative narrative are not simply political opponents of the right, but enemies of the state whose primary interest is in doing harm to America.

We are, apparently, a nation with a guilty conscience, which knew, at some level, that tragedies like Arizona would begin to occur as long as we continued to tolerate this kind of discourse. And, sorry folks, this discourse is coming from the right. It is the discourse of the Birthers, of those who call Obama a Muslim or a socialist, of those who suggest that the president and his Democratic allies are acting in defiance of our Founding documents and endeavouring to take away our freedom.

How is it possible to condone this kind of discourse without believing at some point that the most emotionally challenged among us wouldn't get the idea that someone should do something about this supposed assault on our way of life?

Speaker John Boehner recently refused to take issue with members of his own caucus who hold the view that Obama was not born in America. His argument was to the effect that people hold all kinds of views and that it was not his job to tell everyone what to think.

More to the point is that Boehner and his fellow Republicans know that they are riding a beast, which believes much of the nonsense about Obama and progressives being enemies of the state, and they don't want to alienate this active and influential minority.

Every time conservatives equivocate about the extent to which Democratic politicians love their country or have a legitimate claim to represent her in Congress or the White House, they provide support to those who see progressives as the enemy.

I would challenge you to sit through one Glenn Beck program, with its chalkboard conspiracy theory rants about how the left is trying to destroy America and everything for which it stands. I would ask you to consider how difficult it is to imagine some stupid bastard sitting there watching this tripe as he begins to calculate how he might pick up a gun and thus make himself a hero to like-minded Americans.

When so much of your ideological narrative is about how the other guys are not simply political adversaries, but enemies, can you really be surprised when a marginal few consider the rules of engagement to require violence? Can you be surprised, Glenn? Sarah? Rush? Bill? Sean?

This isn't about both sides using military metaphors or imagery or engaging in name-calling. That's trivial nonsense. This is about one side, the right-wing side, using the significant tools of mass media to paint progressives as a group that should be eradicated, by force if necessary, because they are a perceived threat to our way of life, to our nation. It is also about Republican politicians standing by and letting it happens, in the hope that they can ride the beast to victory without extensive collateral damage. They can't.

The incident in Arizona may not draw all the connections as neatly as some on the left would like, but if we continue on this path there will be a next time. I would suggest that we not be too surprised if that next time comes with solid proof that the perpetrator was acting in order to vanquish those elected officials he deemed un-American or not American enough.

I hope I'm wrong.

Frankly, I don't care if the tone of our political discourse gets chippy on occasion. That's politics in a free society. But if conservatives of conscience really want to do something to help ensure that events like this never happen again, I would encourage them to accept the fact that those who disagree with them politically love their country as much as they do. And I would also encourage them to turn off and tune out anyone who suggests otherwise.

(Cross-posted to Lippmann's Ghost.)