Glenn Beck, laughingstock
March 10, 2010 9:02 am ET by Eric Boehlert
Well, it's not like Michelle Malkin didn't try to warn him.
On his radio show yesterday, conservative blogger Malkin and Beck got into an extended tiff because Malkin didn't think it made sense for Beck to devote his entire Fox News show to his Eric Massa interview. It's true that Malkin based her case on political considerations. (i.e. Why give a Democrat that kind of attention?) But whatever her rationale, it turned out Malkin was giving Beck really good advice.
Of course, he ignored it. (Click on the audio here and listen to how Beck became increasingly annoyed when somebody like Malkin dared question his judgment.) Beck knew what he was doing, thank you very much. He'd personally talked to Massa on the phone, and devoting an hour of cable TV time to him was exactly the right thing to do.
Well, in one sense, Beck was right, because yesterday's colossal flop might just make television history. It might go down as one of the most pointlessly absurd -- and yes, truly unwatchable -- hours in cable news. Last night, the snickering had already reached epic levels. And with the can't-watch-TV performance, Beck most likely took the Massa issue off the table for Republicans, since the whole story now looks more like a comedy than an actual scandal.
And yes, Beck today is a national laughingstock. But honestly, is anyone surprised?
In my column this week, I noted this characteristic about today's unhinged, anti-Obama right wing, which Beck so perfectly personifies [emphasis added]:
Consumed with Obama Derangement Syndrome, 'wingers literally cannot help themselves. Just this weekend, one prominent, albeit unhinged, right-wing site branded Obama as "suicide-bomber-in-chief." They've removed all sensible filters, which means the crazy talk flows 24-7.
It's that complete lack of common sense that led Beck to think Massa would make for interesting TV for an hour. The odds that a 60-minute interview with a resigning congressman would make for great TV were never above 5 percent. And the odds that it wold be a catastrophic failure always hovered around 20 percent. But narcissist Beck, ignoring broadcasting common sense, plowed ahead anyway.
Question: Did anyone on Beck's staff try to talk him out of this daffy idea? Recall that recently Beck's senior producer, a longtime Fox News exec, was unceremoniously shown the door. And I know industry chatter was that Beck didn't want the guy around and that Beck doesn't think he needs somebody outside of his very tight clique overseeing his show.
Well, last night, Beck found out he was wrong. And Beck found out what happens when you program cable news without any commonsense filters. And last night, television viewers saw what happened when narcissism rules and there's no adult supervision on a cable news set.
Result: Glenn Beck becomes a national laughingstock.
UPDATED: From the sad-but-true category is the realization that Beck's Hindenburg performance last night will probably do more damage to his reputation, at least among Beltway scribes, than the endless falsehoods and vicious smears he's launched. Why? Because last night, Beck was guilty of the deadliest media sin of all: producing god-awful television.
Maybe Geraldo was a touch better as he really found a bottle or two from that era.
LOL>>> either way it was just so funny.
See Malice In Wonderland:
Rush Limbaugh Incident
I LOVED IT!
He should just make this his sign off, like "Good night and good luck" or "Good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are !"
I'm really wondering if there actually is a recurrence of his Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma and it has affected his brain. I know that he mentioned in his letter that there were lesions in his latest CT scan that the doctors weren't sure if they were cancer or scar tissue.
Either way, I think the man has lost it.
Sorry, but it's not possible to "become" something that you've already been for quite a while.
QFT (Quoted For Truth)
It's certainly his own business whether he decides to come out or not. But this guy is as gay as the day is long.
The absurd scenarios he's spinning -- tickle fights at a birthday party attended by 50-year-old men? -- show just how desperate Massa is feeling.
I find it incredibly sad.
Be careful about jumping too quickly to a conclusion in this matter, and consider again why malkin would not have wanted beck and company to give Massa any platform, or why beck now is backing away from him in a hasty retreat.
If it's simply your dislike for Massa that makes you want to use him as an embarrassment to beck, be careful and consider the point again, because what you're doing is actually agreeing with michelle malkin and limbaugh and now beck too... you can see that can't you?
You're now singling in a chorus, along with malkin and limbaugh and now beck, of "good riddance to that idiot Massa, let's pay no attention to him anymore, as we regret giving him a platform in the first place."
That doesn't make you balk or pause to think?
That you're now in agreement with, and actually validating the opinion of, michelle malkin?
So? That's a robotic point such as Tommy/right ON would make (and indeed has). If Malkin makes a legitimate point, we should have no problem at all with acknowledging it.
Perhaps you missed when the same thing happened over here: (http://mediamatters.org/research/200810160022).
This is from a TIME online article, that also wants to draw us away from anything relevant Massa may have said, but the article is honest enough to include this...
"And to make things worse, when Massa turned from discussing his own woes to the machinations of Washington, he offered ideas that have no place in Fox News's tightly regulated framework. Massa suggested that Beck and other Americans demand "campaign finance reform" to curb the corruption on Capitol Hill. Beck, who has called such proposals "a huge mistake," put his hand over his mouth, as if he were holding back an upset stomach."
I would have liked MMFA to have offered that little exchange, maybe under a title like...
"Beck Feigns Disgust At Campaign Finance Reform, Calls It "Huge Mistake""
the machinations of Washington
Americans demand "campaign finance reform" to curb the corruption on Capitol Hill.
That's more important right now, and a much sharper citation of a real and real important political issue, and of the ignoring of it by beck and the rest of the media, than any of the lurid and strange fascination with Massa that everyone seems so easily distracted into.
While Beck tried to take advantage of it to get 'juicy gossip' about Pelosi and Rahm, and most hoped for on Obama, it turned out to be a joke on Beck.
But, what is worse of all is the laughing done at the expense of a man who is obviously having some kind of breakdown.
Instead of laughing you'd think someone who have the decency to feel bad about this in the mainstream media.
But, then, they are mostly shallow jr. high schoolers, aren't they?
From the evil regimes installed and/or supported in Latin America over the decades to the current situation in Afghanistan which results from U.S. interference on behalf of medieval warlords as well as Islamic fundamentalists from Pakistan, you can look at most of the world's troublespots and see the not so deft hand of this cockamamie philosophy (after all, Hamas originally grew out of an Israeli desire to encourage a rival to the PLO).
Beck is merely the "beneficiary" of a similar mindset, possibly with similar outcomes.
Like I've been saying, they believe in conspiracy theories without any evidence to support those theories!