Tag: Glenn Beck

Why Is Glenn Beck, Who Did Drugs Instead of Serving in the Military, Smearing Purple Hearts to Promote His Million Moron March?

Jon Ponder

photo-puprple-hepratVia Roger Ebert, Wednesday, amid the other goobledy-gook he spews, GOP-Fox News’ Glenn Beck uttered this barely comprehensible string of phrases:

We are from Washington, D.C., where this Saturday, we will be gathered here at the feet of the Lincoln Memorial and we are going to be — as you see in the corner — oops, in this corner. Can you put it back up? This corner is the merit badge. I have been wearing it. I’m all screwed up because I can’t — television is backwards.

The merit badge — there it is in the bottom of your screen. It is George Washington’s original Purple Heart, but it was just given for merit, for doing something of honor. We didn’t even know about it until 1933 when FDR found three. There were only three of them in existence.

Okay, so that made no sense, but it certainly sounded like he planned to wear George Washington’s Purple Heart to his konklave at the “feet of” the Lincoln Memorial tomorrow, which Andy Borowitz has dubbed the “Million Moron March.”

Actually, Beck has invented a new “badge of merit” (not, mind you, a merit badge) to replace the Purple Heart which he dislikes, he says, because it rewards people for being victims, which is Beck’s Orwellian newspeak for being wounded in the line of duty.

Ryan Witt at Examiner.com explains:

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Most Americans Who Believe Obama is a Muslim Got It from the Media

Trish

6 in 10

— Number of Americans who mistakenly believe Pres. Obama is a Muslim who also report they were told this by the media, with 16 percent (the largest segment) attributing it to television. Another 11 percent say they figured it out themselves from the president’s “behavior and words.”

More Americans Believe Obama is a Muslim

Trish

1 in 5

–The number of Americans (18 percent) who mistakenly think Pres. Obama is a Muslim, according to a Pew Research poll conducted before his comments on the Islamic community center in downtown Manhattan. A Time Magazine poll taken after his comments showed 25 percent of Americans now think Obama is a Muslim.

Obama Not the Only Recent President to Miss Tomb of the Unknown Soldier Ceremony

Trish

The great thing about having Facebook friends who watch Glenn Beck is that you don’t have to. It’s like having Jon Stewart in your news feed, only not nearly as funny.

Three presidents in recent history missed the Arlington ceremony: Reagan, Bush, and Bush.

That’s how I know that the big tea bagging deal at the moment is the idea that Pres. Obama is betraying the troops by spending Memorial Day weekend in Chicago, and therefore will miss laying a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery. Instead, Vice Pres. Biden will perform the ritual while Obama and the First Lady participate in a service at Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery in Elwood, Ill.

One immediately wonders if any past president has committed a similar omission without being called a commie, and David Corn, writing for Politics Daily did the research. Turns out three presidents in recent history missed the Arlington ceremony: Reagan, Bush, and Bush.

In 1983, President Reagan was at a summit meeting, and the deputy secretary of defense — not even the veep! — placed the wreath. Nine years later, President George H.W. Bush passed off the wreath to Vice President Dan Quayle (who had used family connections to get a slot in the National Guard during the days of the Vietnam War draft). And in 2007, Vice President Dick Cheney took on the wreath mission, while President George W. Bush was in Texas, perhaps clearing brush.

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James Cameron Calls Glenn Beck a ‘Fucking Asshole’

Pensito Editors

Pop Eater: And he should know.

The ‘Avatar’ director lashed out at FOX News’ increasingly influential star at a press conference supporting the DVD release of his hit film, but the mood got dark when he was asked about Beck. “Glenn Beck is a f*****g a**hole. I’ve met him. He called me the anti-Christ and not about ‘Avatar.’ He hadn’t even seen ‘Avatar’ yet. I don’t know if he has seen it.”

The famously blunt Oscar winner was likely referring to Beck’s reaction to his 2007 documentary ‘The Lost Tomb of Jesus,’ which casts doubt on the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Later, Cameron toned down the rhetoric while further discussing Beck: “I think, you know what, he may or may not be an a**hole, but he certainly is dangerous, and I’d love to have a dialog with him.”

When asked to expand on why he believes Beck is dangerous, he explained, “Because his ideas are poisonous.”

“I couldn’t believe when he was on CNN. I thought, what happened to CNN? Who is this guy? Who is this madman? And then, of course, he wound up on Fox News, which is where he belongs, I guess.”

Beck Fails to Out-Victim Massa in Interview – Earlier Had On-Air Spat over Massa with Malkin

Jon Ponder

Glenn Beck’s interview with former Rep. Eric Massa (D-N.Y.) was a huge embarrassment — his first indisputable failure since he misspelled “oligarch” in September.

Beck apparently went into the interview believing that Massa would finally provide evidence of the Democrats’ purported “culture of corruption” that Beck and Michelle Malkin have been flogging but can’t seem to prove. If horse-trading for votes in Congress is corrupt, then Congress has been steeping in corruption for centuries. And these same soulless right-wing propagandists were largely silent about Bush-era corruption allegations against Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and their approval of torture techniques; Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his DOJ hive of inept Christian law school grads; betrayers of national secrets Cheney, Karl Rove and Scooter Libby; convicted GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff; twice-indicted former House Minority Leader Tom DeLay; Rep. J.D. Hayworth, now running against Sen. John McCain in Arizona; and convicted Rep. Duke Cunningham, just to name a few.

But Massa was not only unforthcoming on corruption, much to Beck’s dismay, he pulled the floor out from under Beck by trumping him on the foundational hypocrisy of Beck’s ideology — hypocrisy he shares with Sarah Palin, Michelle Malkin, Sean Hannity and the rest — that victimhood is a sign of weakness in liberals but a supreme virtue in themselves and their fellow travelers on the right.

Here’s Michael Scherer at Time:

Beck, who is used to controlling the gravitational force of victimhood around him, kept interrupting to point out that he was a bigger target of even greater forces than Massa. “I have two unauthorized biographies coming out against me in the spring,” Beck said at one point. Minutes later, Beck went even further. “Do you realize my family is at stake?” he said. “You’ve got a little scandal with your children in college. I’ve got one for all time now, because I am not going to resign. I’m not going to back down. I have come to a place where I believe at some point the system will destroy me.”

…But in Massa, Beck found a sort of liberal doppelgänger, a mesmerizing train wreck of a man who was impossible to undercut in the classic fashion. To many conservative allies of Beck, it probably didn’t come as too much of a surprise. In recent days, prominent Republicans like Bill Kristol had expressly warned Beck and others about coming to Massa’s defense just because he was alleging dirty tricks by the Obama White House. “We shouldn’t get into the business of being pro-Massa just because we are antihealth care,” Kristol said Monday on Fox. The ruling talk-radio king, Rush Limbaugh, spent much of Tuesday making clear that he would not be tied to Massa, after spending much of Monday praising Massa’s revelations about Democratic Party politics. “Anybody who embraces this guy is in big trouble,” Limbaugh said…

The conservative blogger Michelle Malkin called into [Beck’s radio] show to tell Beck he was making a mistake. “This guy deserves 60 minutes of our time, really?” Malkin asked.

Beck would not budge. But as those 60 minutes came to an end Tuesday afternoon, the rabble-rouser seemed to recognize that he had fallen into a trap. The Beck big top has room for only one carnival barker at a time. “I think I have wasted your time,” Beck said, staring into the camera at an audience he once spent weeks telling about fanciful FEMA prison camps. “I think this is the first time I have wasted an hour of your time.”

Here’s the audio of Beck and Malkin squabbling over the Massa interview:

Verbatim

Buck Banks

Watching Beck, who sometimes resembles a snake-oil salesman’s dim-witted assistant accidentally promoted to the top job, makes a foreigner wonder just what’s happening to American conservatism … I don’t want to seem forward or rude, but one can’t help but ask: Have you people lost your minds?

— Alex Massie, Scottish journalist, writing about Glenn Beck’s introduction to the United Kingdom for The Daily Beast.

Right Wing Exaggerations of 9/12 Crowd Size Too Extreme Even for Fox News

Jon Ponder

Glenn Beck’s anti-Obama 9/12 march in Washington is over, but the fakery continues. During the event, an executive for Freedomworks, the DC-based lobbying firm headed by former GOP House leader Dick Armey that was hired to astroturf the event, took to the stage and, citing ABC News as his source, flatly lied about the crowd size, saying it was about 25 times the D.C. Fire Department’s estimates.

The crowd size of Saturday’s Tea Bagger march probably did beat a long-standing record, however. It was likely the biggest whites-only rally in the capitol since 1925, when 35,000 people marched in support of the Ku Klux Klan.

Then, in a move that is atypical of a “liberal media” outlet, ABC struck back:

Conservative activists … erroneously attributed reports on the size of the crowds to ABC News.

Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, the group that organized the event, said on stage at the rally that ABC News was reporting that 1 million to 1.5 million people were in attendance.

At no time did ABC News, or its affiliates, report a number anywhere near as large. ABCNews.com reported an approximate figure of 60,000 to 70,000 protesters, attributed to the Washington, D.C., fire department. In its reports, ABC News Radio described the crowd as “tens of thousands.”

Brendan Steinhauser, spokesman for FreedomWorks, said he did not know why Kibbe cited ABC News as a source.

As a result of Kibbe’s erroneous attribution, several bloggers and commenters repeated the misinformation.

It goes without saying — or at least ABC assumes so — that the “bloggers and commenters” repeating Kibbe’s lie were right-wingers. Their ring leader appears to have been Michelle Malkin, who was caught, as GOP Facebook blogger Sarah Palin would say, “makin’ stuff up“:

Malkin plucked out of thin air the bogus claim that ABC News reported the 9/12 protest crowd was 2 million strong. False. Nobody at ABC News ever made that claim, and no sane observer of the D.C. event today would claim with a straight face that somehow 2 million people overtook the nation’s capitol.

It’s pure fantasy.

But did that stop anybody on the right from repeating the hollow claim? Please. Did Newsbusters link to Malkin’s phony claim? Check. Wizbang. Check. Gay Patriot? Check. Examiner.com? Check. Right Pundits? Check.

…Malkin should have just claimed 12 million protesters showed up. Because every one of her willingly gullible followers would have linked to her anyway.

Surprisingly, however, Malkin’s lie proved to be more than Fox News, the leading right-wing propaganda outlet, felt it could get away with. Fox reported that “tens of thousands of protesters” attended the march.

But even if there were 100,000 Tea Baggers at the anti-Obama rally, that was still be less than half the 250,000 at the march where Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech and one-fifth the size of both the anti-Vietnam War march 1971 and the gay rights march in 1987. If there’d been 100,000 people at Beck’s march, it would still be dwarfed by the 1.8 million who attended the president’s inauguration in January.

But at 60,000 or so, the crowd size of Saturday’s Tea Bagger march probably did beat one long-standing record in the capitol, however. It was likely the biggest whites-only rally in the district since 1925, when 35,000 people marched in support of the Ku Klux Klan.

Comparison of Washington Crowd Sizes

By comparison, here are crowd sizes in Washington for previous marches as well as this year’s presidential inauguration:

Pro Ku Klux Klan march Aug. 8, 1925 35,000
Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” march Aug. 28, 1963 250,000
Anti-Vietnam War march Oct. 15, 1969 200,000
Anti-Vietnam War march Nov. 15, 1969 600,000
Anti-Vietnam War march April 21, 1971 500,000
Pro Gay Rights march Oct. 11, 1987 500,000
Million Man march Oct. 16, 1995 400,000
Inauguration of Pres. Obama Jan. 21, 2009 1,800,000
Glenn Beck’s anti-Obama 9/12 march Sept. 12, 2009 60,000