The Glenn Beck Report

I have been trying to do my due diligence to keep current with Glenn Beck’s smears, lies, antics, simplistic lunatic fringe gobbledy-gook like the “9 principles”. I could be busier with this, admittedly, but I’ve got another two websites to maintain not to mention trying to maintain my own sanity while wading through the Bizarro-World of Glenn Beck and his copious mouth. He churns out material faster than a pasture full of horses with diarrhea shoots out a substance with similar properties.

But I have waded into the 9/12 Project website armed with a posting account that seems like I need to get a new password every time I try to post there, and also the sense that there may be a few dozen folks lingering in the weeds who could use some mental health help. A lot of the people that go there are like me, more or less in the same category as rubberneckers who can’t rip back control of their eyeballs from the train wreck that’s happening before them. Judging by the posters, quite a few visitors are living the parodies of liberals’ mocking imagination; hate-blind, redneck, racist American Exceptionalism true believers who don’t quite get it yet that the power structure they’re working for is working against them. But some are genuine conservative thinkers, whose opinions are thoughtfully constructed even though their frame of reference is from another dimension.

The 9/12 Project website suffers from a lack of focus. First, it’s the home of the “9 Principles and and 12 Values”. If only Glenn had included “Truth” and “Reason” as values (or should those have been together in the First Principle?) We, The People”, its banner menacingly challenges, “Demand Answers.” Being Glenn Beck’s trans-Bectarded apologist site for the nationwide movement of teabaggers who showed up in Washington by the hundreds waving their guns and hate signs about our black President (or showed up by the millions in Michelle Malkin’s photoshopped mind) it has to include a certain amount of empty threats. Ho hum. Like the teabaggers are going to get into a shootout with the US government on our own soil. Maybe they ought to Google “Ruby Ridge” or “Waco” for some background info on how that works out.

But the 9/12 website is also a perfect demonstration of what happened when Americans and the media that disservice us got it through their heads that there was “liberal media bias” which needed to be corrected by “fair and balanced” news. The way this fallacious notion altered news reporting is both interesting and tragic. The interesting part is how so-called “hard news” journalists try to include opposing facts or opinions masquerading as facts in every news story. The rationale is that if the writer does this, they are giving themselves more authority by proving that they do not have an axe to grind. The problem with this is that most news does not have counterbalancing facts, it only has facts. When you are reporting on opinions, there are plenty of those on both sides, but facts are facts and they don’t have a liberal or conservative value. That’s the tragic part; Americans have now accepted reporting on opinion in an adversarial fashion to be “news”. Some people call this “infotainment”. There are better names for it. The best one is propaganda.

A quick survey down the index page of the912project.com will illustrate exactly what I mean. In the news… a link to a Wall Street Journal op-ed by lobbyist Joel Jankowski defending lobbyists against Obama’s policy controlling lobbyist access to the White House. Poor lobbyists, can’t get a break. Another link to a WSJ story about how “Organized labor appears to be gaining the upper hand in the skies and on rails, as labor and business battle for influence under the Obama administration.” A link to a web-published American Thinker article by Randy Fardal (who is clearly out of his ever-loving mind) who suggests that smart power meters could be used by “the bribable (sic) government” to turn off power to those who those who don’t support them. Next, a link to a Washington Examiner opinion piece apparently mistakenly put in the “news” column. This is the second piece (at least) that 9/12 has put up about the NEA funding “Obama’s agenda” and making a load of nefarious and meaningless connections between minor players in “ACORN-style groups” and the “President’s agenda”. I guess that rules out any paintings of black people, poor people, unions, or the words “Change”, “Hope”, and any combination of the above.

Continuing down the “News” column I founds something that truly shocked me. A link to an article on HuffPo by “Freddy Krueger” (played in several Nightmare on Elm Street movies by actor/activist Robert Englund). Englund’s article on HuffPo listed his “5 worst fears” and the top one was the lack of reality-based discussion on health care reform. This, he says, is because of fearmongering by teabaggers and other righties with their “pull the plug on grannie” lies. This story was linked in order to steer teabaggers to HuffPo to trash the comments section. Good luck. They’re moderating comments.

Next up, a link to a chunk of The Master himself, from the Glenn Beck Show where he crows about driving the Republican candidate for New York Congressional District 23 out of the race. Glenn says that this is proof that what he’s doing is working, and I hope he’s right. The more moderates they drive away from the GOP the sooner it will collapse. The very next incongruous link is to a GOP list of “new bureaucracies” that the “House Republican Conference claims are created in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s health care reform bill”. Of course, the Speaker doesn’t really have a bill, but that doesn’t stop them from listing 111 imaginary offices that they claim are part of some bill, with references to the bill. But a quick survey shows that they are double dipping to try to make something out of nothing. An example of this is listing an office and then listing each of its functions as a separate office. GOP dishonesty doesn’t seem to bother Glenn Beck except when he’s trying to bash them out of office.

Next we have a report entitled “First Coast Tea Party Hosts ‘D.C. Dirty Tricks’ Town Hall”. This reads like something a 5th grader would have written if the 5th grader knew nothing about American government. There are shocking revelations to be had within the aura of Glenn Beck. That’s because whack job Mormon millenialists see all kinds of things that regular people can’t see, kind of like cats. Here we have photos of the meeting. One of them shows a woman wearing a t-shirt proclaiming that just because she disagrees with Obama that she’s not a racist. Another shows the hall with approximately 400 white people in it and… how many black people? See if you can count them.

Running quickly down the column, we have a piece accusing Biden of “featherbedding” stimulus job numbers. Another piece about Van Jones accusing him of being tied to anti-Beck-Limbaugh-Fox group (so?) A scare piece by Robert J. Samuelson “Could America Go Broke?” in the WaPo. Another link to an opinion column by Norma White, who wants to sound like Andy Rooney espousing her opinion that the “change” that America voted for last November is a laundry list of righty populist ideas heavily loaded with anti-immigrant phraseology. Then another fear piece about swine flu and frightened patients, this included to stoke the fires for the necessity for everyone to pack heat, even in the doctors office. Last (thankfully) in the column, another article from American Thinker, this one by Clarice Feldman who claims that the American paradigm has been changed and the one that is being forced on us is collectivist. This is nothing but red-scare-baiting BS straight from the trickle-down economic sector of the GOP top 1%.

That’s just the “news” column. In the “video” column, a boatload of Faux News propaganda. While I was writing this, they put up the clip from the lying snake of a GOP Congresswoman from North Carolina Virginia Fox, who says that health care reform is a bigger threat to America than terrorists. (They updated the “news” column, too, but I can’t keep up with these lying SOBs, they can lie faster than I can type.) Next: 10,000 attend Tea Party in Houston. (yeah, right.) A propaganda piece by GOP Congressman Mike Pence invoking Reagan against health care reform as “government takeover” of health care. He says “Pelosi plan” half a dozen times and she has none. Pence is noted for gibberish. A piece by self-proclaimed grass roots organization named “Grassfire.net” which also lists Resistnet.com, two anti-Obama websites, details their attempts to crash the Senate Office Building with anti-health-care-reform petitions.

Next is the notorious Michelle Bachmann clip from her appearance on the Sean Hannity program where she states that she wants people to show up in Washington DC where they can “see the whites of their eyes”. Bachmann has previously suggested that teabaggers should show up for her “armed and dangerous”. Why do they have to see the whites of their congressperson’s eyes? So they can pull out their guns and blaze away, I suppose.

I expect that any website run by Glenn Beck or his minions would have a certain degree of insanity to it, and it doesn’t disappoint. As I am documenting on this site, the 9/12 Project itself is an attempt to manipulate people who are insane from fear into becoming tools for a particularly cruel and demented political/religious agenda. Feed their fears. Stoke them with conspiracy theories. Revive red-baiting, gay-baiting, race-baiting, the whole phantasmal convergence of right wing/Mormon nutjob perversion of human decency. Anything that doesn’t fit exactly into their weird, narrow worldview is labeled with some kind of a “communist” label. That includes people, especially black people.

There hasn’t been an external communist threat to America since the end of the Cold War and even back then it was the threat of accidental mutual annihilation. But that never kept Glenn Beck’s hero Cleon Skousen from seeing a red behind every tree and bush in America. And as Reagan would have said, “There you go again”. Reagan would have gotten a good chuckle out of the confusing interchangeability (to the 9/12vers) of the words “communist”, “socialist”, “black nationalist”, “fascist”, “Nazi”, and “progressive”. l find Beck’s harping on “progressives” to be completely amusing. Glenn, the opposite of “progressive” is “regressive”, which fits you to a TEE. The opposite of “social” is “anti-social”, which also fits Glenn nicely. I’ll bet when he was a kid he didn’t play well with others.

Enough of this already. I’m calling the 9/12 Project what it is. It’s dishonest and it’s full of disaffected GOP hacks masquerading as Libertarians. It is a flock of pathetic cowards trying to bully its way into power by showing up to public meetings waving guns and threatening signs. (Are you listening, “I Am The MOB” freaks?) It is infested with liars scheming to undermine the the earnest efforts of those of us who are frantically manning the pumps to keep us from sinking after 8 years of George W. Bush. And worst of all, the people I actually feel sorry for, are the whack jobs that have gotten sucked into the fear, spin, and lies machine fueled by Rupert Murdoch’s disdain for American culture even while he profits from destroying it. The whack jobs who believe that the only way to save America is to destroy it, the people who want to “take our country back” because there’s no way a black man could be President, the people who have lost their jobs, their homes, their children, all lost to the churning machine fueled by the top 1%’s greed and manipulation.

They seem kind of dangerous and sad, don’t they?