It’s hard for me to get hung up on every nutty thing that Glenn Beck says, at least in part because I’ve never watched his show or listened to him on the radio. If Atrios hadn’t spent years mocking his CNN ratings, I might not even know that Beck existed. So, despite his higher ratings on FOX News, I don’t particularly care about Beck. He seems transparently buffoonish and, for that reason, fairly unthreatening.
But I’ve noticed a certain element of the right among elected officials, echoing some of these Beckian talking points. You have Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA) comparing Nancy Pelosi to Ayatollah Khamenei and Kim Jong-il. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) says she is almost an autocrat. You have Michele Bachmann referring to the ACES bill as a form of ‘tyranny.’
You can see that this is a new theme both on the inside and in right-wing media. Rush Limbaugh is comparing President Obama to an African dictator and Newt Gingrich is comparing Obama’s energy policy to the Soviet subjugation of Poland.
Now, I understand that the Republican Party is feeling a bit besieged, what with their diminished numbers and all. And, when you’re feeling powerless, it’s understandable that you’ll feel like the other side is abusing their power a bit. But there isn’t the faintest substantive suggestion in any of this criticism that Obama or the Congressional Democrats are violating laws or the Constitution. You can find more legitimate claims of abuse of power everyday in Glenn Greenwald’s columns. There is a valid libertarian critique of the Democrats. Either the Obama administration is continuing dubious practices that do violence to our privacy and civil rights, or they are obstructing people’s attempts to hold the Bush administration accountable for those abuses. But, strangely, the Republicans are nearly silent and sometimes supportive on those issues.
They’re accusing Obama of tyranny, not for indefinite detention or covering up torture, but for trying to address global warming and extend health care coverage to the uninsured. If you take their rhetoric seriously, Obama is turning America into North Korea or the Soviet Union or Zimbabwe. And, if that were really the case, we’d all be justified in rising up and overthrowing our government. It’s dangerous, irresponsible rhetoric that incites people to violence.
With Beck, Limbaugh, Bachmann and their parrots in Congress, we have a colossal case of projection or accusing others of what is really troubling yourself. In other words, these republican gadflies are the ones who want to be dictators and who actually threaten the environment. They deny this, of course, by placing the blame on their opponents. So, their precious psyches are preserved.
Needless to say, what the republicans are doing is extremely dangerous to the health, both mental and physical, of the entire nation. Needless to say, the Goppers have some serious psychological issues which threaten the well being of all of us. I guess one could say they need therapy and fast.
It’s no surprise, ever, that there are grifters and psychos stirring up fringe crazies, sometimes to crime and violence. That’s just how human population shakes out. What blows me away is not them, or even their success with their bottom-of-the-barrel fanboys, but the deference they are shown by media institutions that view themselves as “mainstream” and “responsible”.
Obvious psychos like Beck are treated as if their logic-free babble merits equal time against those at least trying to make sense and think things through. This is why, despite the ray of hope shone by recent electoral change, most of the time America looks to me pretty much like the Wiemar Republic — a place where fact and reason have become too boring to win prime time and, as Yeats described a similar time,
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
I love this poem, “The Second Coming”; by W.B. Yeats. It is so apropos for our times.
If Obama is turning the U.S. into Zimbabwe, can we hope that Beck’s sorry assed self will soon be breaking rocks in a political prison?
You’re right, of course.
There is no other logical, or even possible conclusion at this point, BooMan: That’s been the plan since November 5, 2008. I’ve been saying it for some time now.
“Will no one rid America of this troublesome Obama?” has been the unspoken question behind the last nine months of hate. Every day that question gets pounded like a steel spike through the heads of hate radio’s audience, driving a little bit closer to that collective lizard brain. Every day we come closer to the effort to try to fulfill the sick Red Dawn fantasies of overthrowing the Tyrant.
Somebody will try to answer it. I am more convinced than ever it will happen soon.
Their rhetoric has been divorced from reality ever since AuH2O got his hindquarters handed to him…
and when the violence happens, they’ll hide behind the first amendment and deny any responsibility or complicity in the action/s of whomever.
we’ve already seen this play out with the knoxville church shooter who was an acolyte of o’reilly, hannity, savage, etal., to mention just one example.
From a purely pragmatic (and coldly cynical) standpoint, the GOP is essentially laying the groundwork for their own destruction. Once the violence reaches the point that it starts to alarm more than just the left, the conservative remnant will begin to be seen as outlaws. If a large enough swath of the public becomes genuinely afraid of right-wing violence, it will become possible to crush them with the power of the state the way American communism was crushed by the Palmer Raids.
Note that I’m not advocating carrying the response to that extreme, but these things have a way of developing irresistible momentum once people get panicked enough.
That said, I do have to confess that when the day comes that they start rounding up neo-Nazis and Klansmen and their latter-day Minutemen fellow terrorists, I’m not going to take time off work to protest their detention.
there’s bats in the belfry…Pastor Urges His Flock to Bring Guns to Church:
lord help us.
Idiot anti-“communist” bullshit served them (and too many Dems) well for half a century. It was pretty much their only successful playbook, so no surprise that they’d be desperately trying to reprise it now that their chickens have come home to roost. Like its predecessors it continues to be a thin wash trying to obscure a structure made of racism, nativism, corporate neo-fascism, and punitive Christianist theocracy.
And Beck? He’s just nuts. Doesn’t matter if his performance makes him rich. He’s still nuts, like anyone who voluntarily listens to him.
“He seems transparently buffoonish and, for that reason, fairly unthreatening”
That’s what people said about Hitler and Mussolini.