The Glenn Beck Report

In the week before the April 19 armed march on Washington (to commemorate Waco and the celebrate the Oklahoma City bombing),  there have been numerous attempts to revise and whitewash history.  Now that the right wing has lost any political credibility, they have been pushed further to the right and mesmerized by the mindless yammering of the cynical and insane loudmouths in the right wing media.  Glenn Beck is the combination of cynicism and insanity.  His brain is malfunctioning from years of drug and alcohol abuse, a lousy home life, untreated mental illness, and membership in a cult (Mormons).

I am working up a page of Glenn Beck quotes to document his calls to the faithful for treasonous and murderous acts against the legally elected government of the United States.  The following is an excerpt from an email I received from David Swanson, author of the book Daybreak – Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union.  David Swanson is the co-founder of the After Downing Street Coalition, which describes themselves as

…  a nonpartisan coalition of over 200 veterans groups, peace groups, and political activist groups that has worked since May 2005 to pressure both Congress and the media in order to hold Bush, Cheney, and their aides accountable for crimes and abuses of power. The coalition takes its name from the emergence in May and June of 2005 of several documents that quickly came to be known as the Downing Street Memos.

Daybreak is an excellent book which I would recommend for anyone who is interested in repairing the damage done to our government through decades of laziness and inattention by the electorate.  This book documents the problems and proposes solutions.  I would suggest that the TeaBaggers who look to Glenn Beck ought to do a little bit of research so they have some ideas instead of just running around with guns like a mob waving Gadsden flags and signs with pictures depicting the President as Hitler.  Obviously, they are clueless.  This book would be a good place for them to get a clue.

But I digress. Here’s the quote from David Swanson’s email that I thought was appropriate for the ignorant, Astro-turfing, racist traitors that will be in the streets on Monday, April 19 celebrating Waco and the Oklahoma City bombing.

You didn’t get mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed a President.

You didn’t get mad when Cheney allowed Energy company officials to dictate energy policy.

You didn’t get mad when a covert CIA operative got outed.

You didn’t get mad when the Patriot Act got passed.

You didn’t get mad when we illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us.

You didn’t get mad when we spent over 600 billion (and counting) on said illegal war.

You didn’t get mad when over 10 billion dollars just disappeared in Iraq.

You didn’t get mad when you saw the Abu Grahib photos.

You didn’t get mad when you found out we were torturing people.

You didn’t get mad when the government was illegally wiretapping Americans.

You didn’t get mad when we didn’t catch Bin Laden.

You didn’t get mad when you saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed.

You didn’t get mad when we let a major US city drown.

You didn’t get mad when the deficit hit the trillion dollar mark.

You finally got mad when.. when… wait for it… when the government decided that people in America deserved the right to see a doctor if they are sick. Yes, illegal wars, lies, corruption, torture, stealing your tax dollars to make the rich richer, are all OK with you but helping other Americans… well fuck that.

That about right? You know it is.

After Downing Street

Have a nice day, Glenn, hope you’re enjoying your $32 million.

UPDATE 4/15/10

After having a day or so to reflect on the above post, I thought a couple of updates were in order.

First off, Rachel Maddow did a great job of clarifying the marches last night in the set up for her interview with Homeland Security Czar Janet Napolitano. There is one armed march, one with no guns. Apparently the Capitol Police will not allow gun-toting maniacs into the nation’s public square. However, there will still be one armed march across the river to the point where Astro-turfers believe they can provoke and threaten the US Government (meaning you and me) as much as they want.

Secondly, the Oathkeepers, a group of self-proclaimed protectors of the People (excellent article about them in Mother Jones) have dropped out of the armed march. Apparently they thought some of the rhetoric was too inflammatory. I dunno, if it’s too inflammatory for Oathkeepers, a group that swears to disobey legal orders from superiors in the military and police force, I’m not sure with whom the TeaBaggers will resonate. The ghost of Benito Mussolini?

Thirdly, the link at AfterDowningStreet given above contains the excerpt that I posted. However, it goes on to equally scold the Democrats, who are another wholly-owned subsidiary of Corporation World USA. I chose to use the section above because it is so apropos for the TeaBagger wingnuts in the street.

Lastly, there is a larger point here and I want to make sure it’s not missed. Those of you who get it, please forgive me while I slap those who don’t get it in the face with a large, wet trout. The reason why y’all suddenly got religion over the Constitution is because they’s a darkey in the White House.

Thanks, and have a nice day, especially you Mormon cultists who believe that black people are cursed by God.

Glenn Beck has followers who hang on his every word and swear he’s the only one in media who is telling the truth. He hates to disappoint, but quite honestly, he’s not interested in politics unless there’s money involved.

An article penned by Lacey Rose to appear in the April 26 Forbes magazine states what should be obvious to anyone who’s been paying attention. Of course, Beck’s faithful are not paying attention, so they aren’t going to like this one bit. Glenn says “I could give a flying crap about the political process.” In fact, the only thing he appears to give a crap about is turning everything he touches into gold at the expense of gullible people who believe that he’s just some ordinary populist guy who got mad as hell and can’t take it any more.

According to the article, Beck’s business concerns took in $32 million (yes, 32) in the year ending March 1 2010. His primary stock in trade is paranoid delusional conspiracy theories, character assassination, outright lies, and fighting buzz words designed to put the deranged on the street with loaded weapons. Anyone reading this from a foreign nation may be surprised that Americans would spend this kind of money on this kind of bullshit. But you have to remember our history.

During the last half century we have undergone a massive upheaval of so-called “traditional values”. Those values still have a lot of support among certain groups, for example, Glenn Beck’s Mormon “church”. Racism and sexism are coded into their religion. Black people are cursed by God, and women know their place… or else. The Anglo population is predicted to become a minority during the first half of this new century, which is frightening to White America who identify this nation’s institutions, history, Founders, and so on as being lily-white as the driven snow. Just as America believes in American exceptionalism, white America believes in white exceptionalism.

Glenn Beck has figured out how to tap into this fear and loathing of change. Electing a half-black President couldn’t have come along at a more perfect time for Beck. Think of what he was doing just 2 short years ago at CNN. Sucking wind, for one thing. Now he’s such a darling for Fox that Rupert Murdoch is financing his show out of his own pocket.

All of this is transparent to the Beckerhead consumer. They don’t care about anything other than Beck offers an explanation for their misery and keeps stoking their fear. We like violence in this country. Don’t be surprised if there’s violence on the streets of Washington DC on April 19, the day that Beck’s TeaBaggers are going into the streets armed to celebrate the anniversary of Waco and the Oklahoma City bombing.

Anyone killed or injured in this process is just collateral damage. As long as it brings in more money, it’s good. All good.

I’m still working on the next installment in my 4 part series on how Glenn Beck’s Mormon faith will be instrumental in splitting the teabaggers along a religious fault line. In the meantime, enjoy…

“Teabagger” makes runner-up for Oxford Dictionary New Word of the Year for 2009

This is a story that Glenn should be proud about, since he barks instructions to the teabaggers for hours at a time. Some of those instructions, by the way, are becoming rather vicious. Glenn better watch how he runs his mouth or perhaps someone over at Faux will actually have to be the adult. For example,

Glenn Beck compares health insurance reform to rape

The unbelievable dry druggie (perhaps) never ceases to amaze. This time he went over the top, even topping his bit where he “poured gasoline” all over a person sitting on his set. This time he said

The American public doesn’t want government-run health care and, for the first time in history, we don’t think it’s the government’s place to give it to us. We’re the young girl saying “no” and government is Roman Polanski: In the end, we are all going to be cowering in France.

Seriously, Glenn, even some of the faithful must be wondering WTF you are doing comparing any public policy to the rape of a 13 year old girl. This ought to spur another round of phone calls and nastygrams to your few remaining sponsors. You can keep up to date on this effort at http://foxnewsboycott.com/. Last count was 85 sponsors lost, you can get information about how to vote with your pocketbook at this fine site. Please do take time to call, it makes a difference.

Glenn Beck’s Candidate Concedes, and then…

I have written at length in an earlier post about the unfortunate schlub Doug Hoffman, the teabagger candidate who claimed that Glenn Beck is his “mentor”. Holy smokes, to think that a grown man would admit that in PUBLIC. Well, on election night, November 3, as the teabagger dream crumbled before his eyes and his mentor lay sick in the hospital with acute appendicitis, Doug Hoffman conceded the race to Democrat Bill Owens. Owens was sworn into office last Saturday, November 7.

So today, just to prove what a weird creepy dick he really is, Doug Hoffman got into a phone conversation with “the mentor” on his radio show and got egged on into the following conversation:

BECK: Alright, so let me ask you two questions. Are you currently bowing to me at the waist? (LAUGHTER) Have you bowed, or will you bow, to anyone, at the waist? No? Okay, good. Second question for you, are you officially un-conceding at this moment?

HOFFMAN: Yes, if I knew this information at the election night, I would not have conceded.

BECK: So are you un-conceding?

HOFFMAN: If that’s possible, yes.

BECK: If the President can bow to an emperor and nobody says anything, yeah, I think you can unconcede.

Update 11/20:
The actual event that spurred this conversation was the news that around 10,000 absentee ballots had not yet been counted. There are various rumors circulating about what actually happened on election night, but thanks to excellent reporting by Submitted to a Candid World, we don’t have to speculate. Hoffman had all the correct information when he conceded. The NY Board of Elections has NOT issued final certification of the election results, it’s conditional. However, Hoffman’s chances of winning with the uncounted absentee ballots are next to none because they were cast before Dede Scozzafava dropped out of the race. Do the math: she was polling at about 20% when she dropped out. That leaves 8,000 votes. Owens had roughly a 3,100 vote victory, which means that in order to make up the difference and win Hoffman would have to take 5,550 or about about 70% of the remaining 8,000 votes. Now think about this for a moment. After what you’ve seen of the teabaggers in video, still photos, on TV, and elsewhere, what do you suppose are the chances that these people would send in an absentee ballot? 70% of the toothless goofballs couldn’t find their ass with both hands let alone obtain, fill out, and mail in an absentee ballot.

I predict that Dede Scozzafava will do much better in absentee ballots than Hoffman. This is just a hunch, but it makes sense if you think about the organization of the GOP versus the angry rabble that voted for Hoffman based on the recommendations of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.

The election will not be officially certified until December. If you go to Hoffman’s website, there are stories on the index page that claim there was a virus in the voting machines (how’s that paper ballot thing the GOP fought for the last decade working out for ya?) and another article that tantalizingly asks the question “Owens in Office Illegally?”. Nope, he’s not. The New York Board of Elections gave Congress a conditionally certified result. If the teabagger boy gets the 70% of the absentee ballots as explained above, then Glenn Beck’s head will explode with glee. If not, it’s going to be Vapo-Rub City for the Prince of Pricks. Maybe everybody should send him a crying towel. Stay tuned…
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Well, Glenn, you had so much success on your first try at throwing the GOP out of office, we here at GlennBeckReport and StopDubya wish you the best of luck and continuing success for many years to come.

Prologue

The Teaparty movement is composed of a diverse collection of groups that focus some of their energy in the same direction.  If you ask teabaggers what defines the group you will get a variety of responses mostly centered around a primitive view of the Constitution, a few Libertarian ideas regarding taxes and specific policy issues  (such as the stimulus package, 2nd Amendment,  health insurance reform, GM bailout, AIDS research,  unemployment benefits, etc., etc.), strong nationalism and anti-immigrant loathing, anti-abortion, homophobia, white-is-right on any issue regarding race, anti-liberalism, anti-communism/socialism, and a Christian theocratic view of governance that is heavily weighted towards so-called “Bible churches” which have no qualms about claiming control over their congregations’ lives based on their literal and bizarre interpretations of the Bible.

Anger is a major center of gravity that pulls teabaggers together. Anger against the “liberal media” and Democratic Party runs deep and wild. Anger against Muslims and other foreigners in places such as “Old Europe” has been stoked for years by the Bush Administration and still thrives today.  Right wing anger, racial and social prejudice, jingoism and American Exceptionalism, populism, and greed are the red meat of radio gasbags like Rush Limbaugh, who spew sarcastic hate speech, conspiracy theories, and outright lies by the hour.

Until Glenn Beck came along, media shock jocks took very few excursions past the boundaries of the GOP talking points. However, since the 2008 election in which Americans elected Barack Hussein Obama as President, the 24 hour right wing political babble has caught up with the GOP. (Is this possibly the verbal equivalent of “How many monkeys with how many typewriters…? I will have to explore that in a future post).  Glenn Beck has determined that Democrats and liberalism do not comprise the entire problem; the GOP is also part of it.  His redux is that the GOP has become too liberal, and that’s why America now has a Black Nationalist President who is busily hatching a steady stream of socialist-fascist plots to get reparations for slavery, among other things.  Barack Obama didn’t win the election, the GOP lost it.  Beck,  along with a few disgraced and rejected GOPERs including Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum, and Dick Armey, are trying to build a 3rd party movement out of the teabaggers and New York’s 23rd Congressional district became the test tube for their experiment.  In a confused and hurried attempt to thrust a lame, unknown, and unqualified candidate into the race, they botched it and now a seat that should have been a GOP gimme is occupied by a Democrat. I wrote about that righty fiasco at length last week.

How PC is too PC?

Religion is a delicate topic among liberals but it’s newsworthy due to its powerful influence over the politics of the groups that are involved.  But before I dig into the topic, I would like to say a few words to liberals.

Modern liberalism has embraced many ideas and trends from pop culture over the last 3 decades. This has been a mixed blessing, as there have been numerous adoptions of over-simplified notions derived from larger initiatives such as ending institutionalized prejudice.  As is normal in human nature, we overreact when making corrections and then have to come back the other way.  One group of behaviors where we’ve overreacted is collectively named “Political Correctness”, or “PC” for short, a name that has itself become a focus for derision from all 180 degrees of the political scale.  This brings me back to the topic at hand, which is Mormonism, Glenn Beck’s religion.

To clarify my vantage point,  my own religious beliefs waffle between atheism and agnosticism, so any criticism of religion you hear from me is definitely not prejudicial because I regard all religions to be equal. Equally wrong, that is, in the fundamental claim they all make which is to know the unknowable. However, the “PC” nature of liberals has allowed the Mormons to sneak under the radar, as criticism of a religious group is considered to be intolerance.

I don’t wish to discuss the Mormon belief system except as to how it relates to politics.  The plain fact is that the LDS church contains a political activist group that has an agenda and is successfully pushing it through the political system.  Two blatant examples of this are the special ballot initiatives in California and Maine, where millions of dollars came from the Mormon front group NOM (National Organization for Marriage) which overturned equal marriage rights for LGBTs, and also the previously mentioned election in NY 23rd, where NOM was a major force against Dede Scozzafava.

Mormons are quick to deny that their church has any political affiliation, but the facts say otherwise. I have tried and failed to get a statement about Glenn Beck from the Church headquarters in Salt Lake City. I did get through 3 layers of the organization to a phone that is apparently never answered, at least not when I’m calling it. The best I could get was someone who refused to be quoted by name who told me that each LDS member has free will to do whatever they want as long as they attempt to follow church doctrines. I pointed out that Glenn Beck has called the President a racist, fantasized about killing Michael Moore and Nancy Pelosi, and lies on a continuing basis about matters that are important to the nation.  The response was dogmatic:  Any statement regarding Glenn Beck would have to come from “the Leadership” (which means The President and The Apostles, who speak to and for God on earth). Apparently God must think Beck is OK, as they haven’t made any attempt to distance themselves from his antics.  This doesn’t mean that Mormons universally support Beck.  On one chat board, a courageous Mormon fellow wrote an article under the subject line “Glenn Beck An Embarrassment To Mormons–Perpetuates Harmful, Untrue Stereotypes”. Wow, that is speaking to power, can I get an “Amen!?”

My point here is that we should not regard the Mormon church as ONLY a religious organization. They are more than that, the church is functionally a political activist group.  The Mormons would be of little interest to me other than their cult-ish beliefs and secrecy were it not for the fact that they are an international organization with a political agenda and $billions if not $trillions in assets to push it.

NEXT: Not just about fresh-faced boys and a great choir

Glenn Beck is a lot of things to a lot of people. To most, he’s an opportunistic, money-grubbing, phony clown of a Mormon millenialist meat puppet. Beck uses his own ignorance as a foil while he poses simple hypotheses about complex questions and then allows “expert” crackpot guests on his show to conjure up facts out of thin air or their rectums to support Beck’s crackpot conspiracy theories while he fawningly agrees with him, nodding like a bobblehead with wide-eyed amazement about how Obama has done/is doing the most dreadful things.

To one man, however, Glenn Beck was something much more. Glenn Beck could reach through his empty head and grab hold of his shallow heart. That man would be Doug Hoffman, “staunch conservative” from out of nowhere, who got talked into running against Dede Scozzafava, who fell out of favor with Fox News and other conservative media. Michelle Malkin called Dede “an ACORN-friendly, union-pandering, tax-and-spend radical Republican.” Rush Limbaugh accused her of “bestiality”, proclaiming that she had “screwed every RINO in the country”. (This was so unbelievable that I had to include it in this post. I realize that including comments from other right wingnuts besides Glenn Beck is a bit off-topic, but sometimes it’s good to have them for a complete context. Think of it like an artist’s palette of stupidity from which you can savor the meaning created by the meaninglessness, greed, stupidity, and grabbasticism of the morally bankrupt and politically corrupt right wing nut movement of Beck and the Becktards, Rush and the Dittobots, Michelle Malkin and the perverts, Michael Savage and the Wieners, and so on and so on.) But, as usual, I digress. Here’s the Rush Limbaugh quote where he says Dede practices bestiality:

Glenn Beck took a few swings at Dede Scozzafava himself. He bashed her in the video below for being “pro-choice, pro-stimulus”, ACORN-endorsed (and also “for the working families party”), and “the Democrat is basically the same as the Republican”. Glenn also managed to flail away at Arnold Schwarzenegger, the GOP, and Newt Gingrich.

Glenn’s cure? Stop the insanity! (He can’t resist citing Einstein’s “definition” of insanity. Note to Glenn Beck: you’re no Einstein.) He says the GOP should have chosen Doug Hoffman, who collected the endorsements of Sarah Palin, Steve Forbes, former US Senators Rick Santorum and Fred Thompson, and “The former House Majority Leader Dick Armey are [sic] also behind him”. Hmm, there’s something kicking around in the back of my mind… what do all of those endorsers have in common? Well, I guess it’s that none of them are from New York? Oh, WAIT A MINUTE… What Glenn Beck probably didn’t notice is that each of these endorsements comes from a failed and/or disgraced former GOPER who have fallen from power by running almost as right as Glenn is.

Watch:

So what’s the ONLY problem Glenn sees? The GOP continues to back the “Obama lite Republican.” Oh, that nasty Newt Gingrich! He’s one of the (great big finger quotes) “Republicans” supporting the Obama Lite candidate although Glenn has “nothing bad to say about him.” LOL! Glenn disagrees with Newt because Newt says that the local party has the right to choose their own candidate. Oh NO YOU DIDN’T! Glenn Beck says you’re WRONG on that, Newt, you vote for the person you agree with MOST! So in Glenn Beck’s world, the local party should vote for who, exactly? The candidate HE SUPPORTS. After all, how can you sleep “night after NIGHT” knowing you voted for the “ACORN-supported candidate”?

Well, before I forget, I want to go ON THE PUBLIC RECORD as supporting Glenn Beck in his effort to keep doing what he did last night, over and over, in 2010, in 2012, as long as he still can. PLEASE keep trying to pull the GOP to the brink of the lunatic fringe where you are and then push them over! PLEASE!

I couldn’t find much of anything about Doug Hoffman on the 9/12 website except a link to a story where he gets Fred Thompson’s endorsement. Only the link to the story and the story itself, from October 28, says Fred is endorsing Doug THOMPSON. This was so unbelievable I had to take a couple of screenshots for you. Talk about having some powerful NAME RECOGNITION, eh, Glenn? LOL.

So who is Doug Hoffman/Thompson? Turned down by the GOP Congressional Committee. Endorsed by lunatics. He’s an accountant from Saranac Lake, not even in the 23rd District. He claims to have been fighting for the heart and soul of the GOP which is waaaay too liberal. He says he’s going to “take America back” by “revolution”, which is just white nationalist code words. He doesn’t know anything about local issues in the 23rd District, but he says that “I think that this district is so wide and vast that ALL THREE CANDIDATES aren’t familiar with local issues in each different sector”. Really? So what are were voters supposed to do? Just TRUST you because you say you’re honest? You say you know about taxes, spending, and liberals so people should just vote for you because of that and because a pack of GOP has-beens says your OK?

Here’s the deal. I am sympathetic to the idea of 3rd party candidates, in fact I was a Nader supporter and even put a Ron Paul sign in my yard last fall along with the others. I even agree with Beck’s thesis that major party candidates should not have a lock on the process. There is no reason why people shouldn’t be able to file and run for any office and I favor making that easier rather than harder. The more the merrier.

But I would never support any candidate who has no specific policy positions, local or otherwise, except that he can spew the specific political/religious dogma such as “Obama-lite”, “tax and spend”, “RINO”, “take our country back”, “revolution”, and other meaningless gibberish. Doug Hoffman was the 9/12 Project candidate, in fact he was even listed on http://912candidates.org/gold-list/, the “unofficial” 9/12 website that has since taken his name down because even they realized that being associated with Glenn Beck was killing Hoffman’s chances. (Or maybe they took it down because they were trying to avoid the humiliation of backing a candidate who got his ass handed to him last night.) Doug Hoffman never looks very bright in any of the video clips I’ve seen, and the audio clip of him on the Glenn Beck radio show sucking up to Glenn and even calling him his “mentor” makes him sound like a driveling stooge.

Listen:

So congratulations, Glenn, and to the 9/12 Project, and to all the “take our country back” race-baiting “Patriots” from all over America who poured money and support into a non-resident candidate to defeat the “liberal” Republican. Glenn, you can put Dede Scozzafava’s scalp on your wall.

And you can also chalk up another GREAT BIG FAIL, Glenn, because what you’ve accomplished is to further divide the conservatives along the faultline of crazy. I think it’s wonderful, heckuva job, Glennie.

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?

I’ve seen a lot of wakko stuff coming from the First Spokesbaby of the Mormon Waahbernacle. But this has got to be the lamest bad attempt at spin I’ve ever heard, even from Glenn Beck, which is saying a lot.

We need a bit of history on “net neutrality”. In a nutshell, what that means is when you request a packet of information or send a packet of information over the internet, it has an equal chance to pass through the system as every other packet sent or received. There are no preferences given to “paying customers” of the system because we ALL pay for it through our ISP charges, webhosting fees, and whatever other incidental costs to us as taxpayer/citizens.

The right wing business lobby has been licking their chops trying to change this “my packets are equal to your packets” system into a “pay for access” system where those who have money to spend (like corporations, for example) can pay off the internet services to give THEIR packets or packets of their choice PRIORITY over your packets. What this would result in is a multi-tiered system where popups, ads, and other commercial and business web traffic will go at high speed, your personal traffic will be down in the dumpster.

That’s the 10,000 foot overview. Into the discussion wades Glenn Beck, armed with an agenda but no real information, and RWNJ think-tank Americans for Prosperity toady Phil Kerpen, who is obviously no expert on anything except blowing smoke up the colon of America. Watch the clip:

OMG. Did I just hear Glenn say at 1:13 that net neutrality is analogous to “I don’t remember anybody saying in the 1930s that everybody had a right to radio and we gave away free radios through the government, and I don’t remember anybody saying in the 1950s that everybody had the right to free television but that’s where we’re headed now.” Oh, Glenn, you are such a FAIL. Your analogy is a total failure. It’s not even close to what net neutrality is about. First off, your straw man argument is phony because it’s based on the falsehood that there is a proposal to give away free televisions. Where did you hear that one, Glenn? LOL it must have been the voices that got through your tinfoil hat.

Further, your analogy FAILS because your dumbass attempt to confuse the medium with the hardware crumbles under the weight of its own stupidity. Broadcast media is one-way communications that is paid for by commercials or taxpayer funds. Internet traffic is two-way communication that allows people to send and receive content from their own hardware through the public internet system. What you’re proposing to do is to make it a PRIVATE system where members of the general public will have to pay $$ to private companies if they want to have equal access to the system. In other words, you are doing what you ALWAYS do, which is tout the AMERICAN CASTE SYSTEM.

What you ramble into at 2:50 is paranoid anti-government ranting (well, ALL of your ranting is paranoid and most of it is anti-government so this is stating the obvious) about how the FCC wants to take over television so it’s “all like the BBC”. FAIL. There is NOBODY in the FCC who has ever thought that, Glenn. You are a moron for saying it and your moron righty astroturfer Phil Kerpen is an asshat for agreeing with you. Laughable!

Glenn says you have to wait until tomorrow to find out whose behind the “conspiracy” to take over the internet. I don’t make you wait, you can see it all in the video and widget below. No waiting required.

Just in case you have any doubts about net neutrality, and why it’s really the only way to go, please watch the following video. It will take about 5 minutes.

Also, you might enjoy this widget, which interactively allows you to see the groups who are actively trying to make you pay extra for your bandwidth. You know the commercial where the brown-haired woman gets pissed off about a few cents tax on soda and then leaves the trunk open? If the people in this widget get their way, you’ll WISH it was just a few cents. Enjoy.

Glenn couldn’t let go of the tongue-lashing that Fox News got from Anita Dunn without a GOPER-style slimefest. Of course, if anyone says anything bad about him, there must be something WRONG WITH THEM. So he sent his minions out to see if there was anything they could find on MS Dunn. He told them to dig deep, drive their Lexus to the Nexis!

The minions came up with a video where MS Dunn is speaking to a group of high school students. In the speech, she states that she is an admirer of Mao Tse Tung and Mother Theresa. That’s it! That’s all the proof Glenn needs to PROVE WITHOUT A DOUBT that Anita Dunn is just another one of Obama’s socialists! She says it in the video, no kidding! She says she admires and turns to Mao… but… why? How did Anita Dunn become an admirer of Mao?

If you think you can find out from Glenn Beck, you’re wrong. He won’t show you where she takes the line of thought, he only plays the clip long enough to make it seem that all she does all day (when she’s not watching his show like a TV lizard) is read Mao, Stalin, Hitler, and who else? Glenn has TWO stacks of books he says came from his office and he claims to have read them all! More on that in a minute.

Anita Dunn was making a point about how to choose your decisions carefully. Glenn wouldn’t understand the point, because he can’t. He’s not wired for it. He’s not wired for honesty, either. He takes Dunn out of context (obviously) and then starts cramming words, er, books into her head! In the second stack of books Glenn brought in “from his office” he has the Bible, books about American icons like Washington, Adams, and so on. But… he does NOT mention the Book of Mormon. OK, I really don’t care about the religion, it’s all pretty much crap to me. But why does Glenn Beck bring in the Bible but not the Book of Mormon, the book that changed his life? Because he’s a LIAR, that’s why. The Book of Mormon only pops up when Glenn is raking in cash from the faithful.

Glenn goes way off the leash here with a wild claim that he is responsible for the announcement that Anita Dunn will be leaving the White House staff. Oooh, they’re scared of you Glenn! They’re going to let her go because YOU called her a Maoist Marxist Socialist Communist Fascist! They are so scared that they won’t call the Red Phone!! Head for the hills, Anita, Glenn Beck is after you!

Sigh. If only it were true, you’d be such a hero, at least in your own mind. But Glenn, if you weren’t so busy daydreaming about the Mormon afterlife, you could have just used the Google to find out that she is interim White House Communications Director and will be leaving at the end of the year.

Pffffffffffft. That’s the air escaping from the blow-up clown doll that is Glenn Beck.

Update 10/19/09

Media Matters is undoubtedly one of the finest sources of news media fact-checking. If you have perused this site, you will have noticed that some of the video links are from their site. Bless ‘em.

Their Research Department came up with the full quote from which Glenn Beck dishonestly put together the video that made it appear that Mao is Anita Dunn’s go-to guy. As I reported above, Beck used a portion of the video to make it seem that she is an acolyte of Mao and then started a rant about what books she reads when he has no way of knowing that and his assumption is based on a false premise that he knowingly created.

But once again Glenn Beck is busted by the inconvenient truth. This time Media Matters came up with the whole video, which is something I was planning to do Monday but I got busy with students. So here’s the real quote:

A lot of you have a great deal of ability. A lot of you work hard. Put them together, and that answers the “Why not?” question. There’s usually not a good reason.

And then the third lesson and tip actually come from two of my favorite political philosophers, Mao Zedong and Mother Teresa -- not often coupled with each together, but the two people that I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point, which is, you’re going to make choices. You’re going to challenge. You’re going to say, “Why not?” You’re going to figure out how to do things that have never been done before. But here’s the deal: These are your choices. They are no one else’s.

In 1947, when Mao Zedong was being challenged within his own party on his plan to basically take China over, Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist Chinese held the cities, they had the army, they had the air force, they had everything on their side. And people said, “How can you win? How can you do this? How can you do this against all of the odds against you?” And Mao Zedong said, you know, “You fight your war, and I’ll fight mine.” And think about that for a second.

You know, you don’t have to accept the definition of how to do things, and you don’t have to follow other people’s choices and paths, OK? It is about your choices and your path. You fight your own war. You lay out your own path. You figure out what’s right for you. You don’t let external definition define how good you are internally. You fight your war. You let them fight theirs. Everybody has their own path.

And then Mother Teresa, who, upon receiving a letter from a fairly affluent young person who asked her whether she could come over and help with that orphanage in Calcutta, responded very simply: “Go find your own Calcutta.” OK? Go find your own Calcutta. Fight your own path. Go find the thing that is unique to you, the challenge that is actually yours, not somebody else’s challenge.

The reason I knew that Anita Dunn had said that she was talking about making the point about choices was that Beck himself aired a longer portion of that cliop on his October 15 show. I got the link to the original report from Twitter, from @Moms4GlennBeck (watch them block me). Beck went on to clip the video for his shocking “special report” and then start his character assassination attempt against Anita Dunn, who was the first from the White House to point out that Fox in general is NOT a news organization.

There has been some news show chat with talking heads wondering why the White House would take on the yucky task of cleaning Fox News off of their shoes. I suspect this was a shot fired across Rupert Murdoch’s nose to let him know that Fox stands to lose their press credentials (meaning they would not be allowed on Air Force 1 or in press briefings) if they don’t clean up their act. Time will tell.

I will be your father figure
Put your tiny hand in mine
I will be your preacher teacher (be your daddy)
Anything you have in mind
I will be your father figure
I have had enough of crime
I will be the one who loves you
Until the end of time
~~ George Michaels

Ahh, the Good Old Days. The days when families were close knit, where Mom stayed home and baked a pie to serve with the pot roast when Dad got home from the office. The fresh smell of autumn air and the crunch of leaves under your feet as you walked home from school on a Friday daydreaming about the sock hop. Go back to when things were black and white, including photography and television. Back when you never saw a black person on TV except the pick-a-ninnies in the cartoons and maybe Sammy Davis Junior, who got on because he was also Jewish. Back to simpler times.

Relive our lovingly retouched memories through Glenn Beck, as he rummages through the windmills in the corner of his mind. Oh, Glenn’s memories! Oh, wait, that’s right, Glenn was born in 1964 so he wouldn’t actually remember any of that stuff because by the time he was 10 years old Woodstock was 5, civil rights was 10, the American cultural revolution was well underway and his Mom wouldn’t have made an apple pie for 5 years, although she might have burned her bra, got a business degree, and gone to work.

But never mind. Glenn wants to create an image in your mind of a world that he’s never seen so he can set up his crazy proposition that he’s the Dad (that he never had) who’s telling you what you need to hear so you can fix your life. Watch….

Oh, he hates to do it, to tell you the party is over, he hates it so much it makes him weep with regret as he chokes out the words. But he has to do it, because the politicians are only going to take you further away from that dreamy world of the past, WHICH WASN’T PERFECT, MIND YOU, but it was a darn sight better than today.
Glenn Beck’s sanitized view of America in one word: authoritarian. He wants to not only tell you what’s wrong with America, he wants to demand that you follow his instructions on how to fix it.

OK, Glenn. Given your age, fractured childhood and your years of heavy drug and alcohol abuse, the only way you could have gotten that rosy view of the past was by watching Leave It To Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet reruns on TBS. Since you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about, why should we let YOU be the Father Figure George Michaels sang about? I’m not inclined to let you or anyone like you turn the clock back, even if you could.

I was there, Glenn, and it wasn’t that great. We lived in constant fear that a madman might push the button and end it for all of us. Hundreds of thousands of WWII vets drank their way through “shell shock” because PTSD wasn’t discovered yet. We fought a largely forgotten war with China on the Korean peninsula. Women and minorities struggled for the same rights as white men had.

I don’t want to go back, Glenn, but if there was a way I could send you back, I would surely do it.

In this classic segment, Glenn Beck has one of his staffers paste a Nancy Pelosi mask on her face and sits down at the table with her to share a glass of poisoned wine.

Beck is cluelessly trying to wage class warfare by taking a news bite that Pelosi is planning to host a two day issues conference at her home.  The Politico story Glenn is referring to here seems to be taking issue with the political reality that politicians have big donors and they hold events to raise money.  Glenn spins the story with numerous sarcastic statements designed to make you angry that Pelosi has money.  But wait… when GOPERs get rich, that’s OK, right, Glenn?  Or maybe not, because at 1:28 of the video clip Glenn oddly inserts a comment into his rant about Eric Cantor’s fundraiser for lobbyists where he raised $1 million.  Have you suddenly become a Marxist, Glenn?

Beck quickly goes back to his Pelosi theme, though, and at 1:45 or so the camera pans over to show another figure sitting at the table with Glenn.

The rest is classic.  Death threat to Nancy Pelosi at 2:34.  Glenn seems to come unglued after that, laughing insanely at a joke only he seems to get, dropping names and acting like the  grubby child from the wrong side of the tracks that decent people wouldn’t let their kids play with.  What a goofball.

View the video: