The Facts and Fictions of Tea Partying

Glenn Beck =

 

This is hardly supportive of your oft-claimed yet continually shown inaccurate claim of "moderates" in the tea party movement.

Do be specific thumbs - lest you become just another "I-believe-everything-Glenn-Beck-says" tea party moron. You specifically said "attacks on america and its core values". Don't bull**** around it - what were these "attacks" and what are these "core values"?

I mean, holy ****: You just trumpeted for some 250+ words how you want media to stop sensationalizing the "movement" and how the "moderates" are out there at the teabagger rallies, yet here you are, blindly referencing Glenn freeking Beck.

Edit: I went back and read more details on this van jones saga and it appears he was a member of a socialist organization and a truther. While a bit out there, I'm not sure how this is relevant to "attacks on america" and these oft-fancied "core values".

 

I find it hard to believe claims about how the media (except Fox, apparently) is liberal and is still in a honeymoon with Obama. I tend towards a more obvious, often ignored possibility: they think he is doing a good job. In their professional opinion, he is trying to improve the country and succeeding to do so thus far. This is much more believable to me than the "everyone is biased except Fox" approach (and Fox, of all stations, is the most biased).

Exclaiming the "liberal media" is a fine fall back though. It's like religious zealots using the age old "God is testing us" excuse.

 

No, giddyup just slogs through the insult, innuendo and soft-headedness with the BEACON OF REASON and the SWORD OF TRUTH.

I did, in fact, vote for Obama. ... but I better back away because I'm only derailing the thread. Does the derailment of a derailment get the thread back on track?

 

baylorbear's back?

 

told you Beck's crazy

 

Something I learned around third grade: just because teacher writes something on the blackboard, it doesn't make it so.

 

Interesting series on Beck's history at Salon. Here are some excerpts from parts 1 and 2. I guess 3 runs tomorrow...

All of the above from Part 1: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/21/glenn_beck/print.html

Part 2...

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/22/glenn_beck_two/print.html

 

Interesting piece from Greenwald, who writes well...

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/09/22/beck/print.html

 

Salon also has another recent article on Beck's "mentor", Cleon Skousen that is an interesting read:

[rquoter]
Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck's life

Cleon Skousen was a right-wing crank whom even conservatives despised. Then Beck discovered him

Sept. 16, 2009 | On Saturday, I spent the afternoon with America's new breed of angry conservative. Up to 75,000 protesters had gathered in Washington on Sept. 12, the day after the eighth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, sporting the now familiar tea-bagger accoutrements of "Don't Tread on Me" T-shirts, Revolutionary War outfits and Obama-the-Joker placards. The male-skewing, nearly all-white throng had come to denounce the president and what they believe is his communist-fascist agenda.

Even if the turnout wasn't the 2 million that some conservatives tried, briefly, to claim, it was still enough to fill the streets near the Capitol. It was also ample testament to the strength of a certain strain of right-wing populist rage and the talking head who has harnessed it. The masses were summoned by Glenn Beck, Fox News host and organizer of the 912 Project, the civic initiative he pulled together six months ago to restore America to the sense of purpose and unity it had felt the day after the towers fell.

In reality, however, the so-called 912ers were summoned to D.C. by the man who changed Beck's life, and that helps explain why the movement is not the nonpartisan lovefest that Beck first sold on air with his trademark tears. Beck has created a massive meet-up for the disaffected, paranoid Palin-ite "death panel" wing of the GOP, those ideologues most susceptible to conspiracy theories and prone to latch on to eccentric distortions of fact in the name of opposing "socialism." In that, they are true disciples of the late W. Cleon Skousen, Beck's favorite writer and the author of the bible of the 9/12 movement, "The 5,000 Year Leap." A once-famous anti-communist "historian," Skousen was too extreme even for the conservative activists of the Goldwater era, but Glenn Beck has now rescued him from the remainder pile of history, and introduced him to a receptive new audience.

Anyone who has followed Beck will recognize the book's title. Beck has been furiously promoting "The 5,000 Year Leap" for the past year, a push that peaked in March when he launched the 912 Project. That month, a new edition of "The 5,000 Year Leap," complete with a laudatory new foreword by none other than Glenn Beck, came out of nowhere to hit No. 1 on Amazon. It remained in the top 15 all summer, holding the No. 1 spot in the government category for months. The book tops Beck's 912 Project "required reading" list, and is routinely sold at 912 Project meetings where guest speakers often use it as their primary source material. At one 912 meet-up I attended in Florida, copies were stacked high on a table against the back wall, available for the 912 nice price of $15. "Don't bother trying to get it at the library," one 912er told me. "The wait list is 40 deep."

What has Beck been pushing on his legions? "Leap," first published in 1981, is a heavily illustrated and factually challenged attempt to explain American history through an unspoken lens of Mormon theology. As such, it is an early entry in the ongoing attempt by the religious right to rewrite history. Fundamentalists want to define the United States as a Christian nation rather than a secular republic, and recast the Founding Fathers as devout Christians guided by the Bible rather than deists inspired by French and English philosophers. "Leap" argues that the U.S. Constitution is a godly document above all else, based on natural law, and owes more to the Old and New Testaments than to the secular and radical spirit of the Enlightenment. It lists 28 fundamental beliefs -- based on the sayings and writings of Moses, Jesus, Cicero, John Locke, Montesquieu and Adam Smith -- that Skousen says have resulted in more God-directed progress than was achieved in the previous 5,000 years of every other civilization combined. The book reads exactly like what it was until Glenn Beck dragged it out of Mormon obscurity: a textbook full of aggressively selective quotations intended for conservative religious schools like Utah's George Wythe University, where it has been part of the core freshman curriculum for decades (and where Beck spoke at this year's annual fundraiser).

But more interesting than the contents of "The 5,000 Year Leap," and more revealing for what it says about 912ers and the Glenn Beck Nation, is the book's author. W. Cleon Skousen was not a historian so much as a player in the history of the American far right; less a scholar of the republic than a threat to it. At least, that was the judgment of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, which maintained a file on Skousen for years that eventually totaled some 2,000 pages. Before he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen's own Mormon church publicly distanced itself from the foundation that Skousen founded and that has published previous editions of "The 5,000 Year Leap."

As Beck knows, to focus solely on "The 5,000 Year Leap" is to sell the author short. When he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen had authored more than a dozen books and pamphlets on the Red Menace, New World Order conspiracy, Christian child rearing, and Mormon end-times prophecy. It is a body of work that does much to explain Glenn Beck's bizarre conspiratorial mash-up of recent months, which decries a new darkness at noon and finds strange symbols carefully coded in the retired lobby art of Rockefeller Center. It also suggests that the modern base of the Republican Party is headed to a very strange place.

[/rquoter]

It goes on quite a bit at Salon.

I didn't know Beck was a converted Mormon. Given the fundamentalist’s general distain for that offshoot of Christianity, I wonder how many of his followers know.

 

In terms of negative impact on the American conversation and rational debate, definitely, but Beck is much less methodical and much more random. Glenn Beck will do in Glenn Beck, I'd wager. The Salon piece is only the beginning.

Edit PS -- Mormons are usually more grounded in their everyday interaction with the world than Glenn Beck (in my experience). Fringe groups aside, as the Book of Mormon aside, I've always found people with a deep Mormon faith to be very accepting of reasoned conversation and other viewpoints. "Under the Banner of Heaven" details Mormon offshoot sects, and maybe that fits Beck better?

 

McCarthy methodical? "I have here in my hand a list of 205, I mean 57, I mean 81, I mean 5,000, I mean 17 confirmed Communists in the State Department." McCarthy thought it was a good idea to take on the Pentagon. Dude regularly showed up to hearings drunk. One of the reasons he was ultimately defeated was because he behaved so erratically. If McCarthy in any way had his stuff together, I think he could have been king.

Beck is similarly an opportunist, and is indeed all over the place. I agree, he does seem to have self-destructive tendencies (e.g. claiming tonight with Katie Couric that both H. Clinton and Obama were better for the country than McCain, completely ignoring his record(ings), that he mostly shut up about McCain's failings after he got the nomination to focus on attacking the Dems full-time). I do hope he flames out before he does any lasting damage.

 

Adding, Krakauer is awesome; I really liked that book. That Salon article on Cleon Skousen & Beck's support for his 5,000 Year Leap certainly fits your theory.

 

I won't miss anything, I'll break it up into easy to digest bites...

I disagree about all of this. It wasn't "learned" people who thought it was "death panels," it was Sarah Palin and that woman that got eviscerated on TDS. They made it up because the 1000 page bill had enough language in there to show that "death panels" would not happen.

By the way, "clear, concise writing" is never part of bills in Congress because they have to contain all of the legalistic jargon that eliminates the possibility of things like "death panels." With an issue as complex as healthcare, I WANT to see a big bill because that is part of what assures that all of the issues have been thought through, planned out, and fully documented.

So, if they are US citizens, you are OK with them being part of a public plan (medicaid), but scared of setting up a public option other than Medicaid.

Hospitals do try to bill the people without insurance that they treat, but many people don't pay (because of the exorbitant cost) and as such, we are left with the taxpayer paying for expensive hospital treatments that 8 times out of 10 could have been handled at a much lower cost in a doctor's office if the person had insurance.

I'm pretty sure this is part of the bills now working their way through Congress. I know you are a proponent of piecemeal legislation, but I believe if lawmakers are going to deal with healthcare, they should do it all in one fell swoop rather than a piece at a time. If tweaks need to be made later, that is the time for piecemeal changes.

I am pretty sure that you said that the cost would be two trillion, which qualifies as trillions.

Even assuming the public option takes away their ability to offer "basic" health plans, they could still offer value added plans ("Cadillac plans") to people willing to pay for them.

If they do go out of business completely, there will be plenty of job openings in the public option since its business would presumably be booming.

The current insurance companies have economies of scale and are unbelieveably inefficient. They have 30% overhead where Medicare has 1%. Obviously, the government knows how to run a great healthcare option, seniors are the ones happiest with their healthcare and they are all covered by the government.

Easy solution, make the penalty higher than the cost of providing healthcare for the employees.

I am a proponent of allowing the government to pay for abortions in the case of rape, incest, or to protect the physical health of the mother if her life is in danger (ectopic pregnancy, etc.).

Really? They are FAR more beneficial than harmful in every other advanced nation. Why do you think it would be different here?

Lots of great ideas here, many of which are in the current bill. Love interstate sales, elimination of drug advertising, and paying for school for doctors and nurses contingent on public service after graduation.

Agree with all except tort reform, which has been proven to fail at reducing malpractice rates for every state in which reform has passed. Why would you want to propagate a failed tactic?

 

beck really sounds like a stand-up guy.

 

See, this is what I don't understand. If a person came up to me and said, "Every single person you know is lying to you except me", I'd pretty much assume they're full of it. When you get all your information from one source, that source really can't trusted to be "fair and balanced".

If someone came up to me and said "Obama controls every single news outlet in the world except Fox News", I'd pretty much assume they're full ot it.

 

That three-part Salon series, linked above, on Teabagger patron saint Beck's former career as a wacky "Morning Zoo" radio DJ is fascinating. It notes how his wacky morning show routine relates to his success in talk radio / television. I didn't know he used to work at 104 KRBE, but apparently he did from 1988-1990, carrying on conversations with his sock puppet "Clydie Clyde." (Seemingly, Clydie Clyde's voice lives on whenever Beck impersonates his critics or Pelosi/Reid.)

The author really humanizes him (painting him as a disaffected kid who idolized Orson Welles), and then we get to Beck's reputation for sophomoric pranks, and then this, on how Beck dealt with a Phoenix radio professional rivalry with a personal friend:

From Part 2 :

Beck is no longer humanized.

 

Exactly. You nailed it and I repped you for it.