"Shock jock": Beck continues to ignore his unhinged rhetoric
July 30, 2010 11:17 pm ET by Mike Burns
On his Fox News show tonight, Glenn Beck discussed the forced resignation of former Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams and admitted to Tea Party Express Chair Amy Kremer that he is "a recovering shock jock." He then condemned some of Williams' remarks, claiming: "In my wildest dreams, I would never have said that Allah is a 'monkey god' or all Muslims are animals or we should repeal the 13th or 14th amendment."
While Beck was surely right in condemning William's explosive rhetoric, to claim that he himself is "a recovering shock jock" and then suggest that he has walked away from the format is pure fantasy.
Earlier this month, Beck decried Six Flags' "Muslim Day," comparing it to having "Japanese Day" after Pearl Harbor. In shock as to why any Muslim would participate in the event, Beck asked: "Wouldn't your wife say, 'We are not going to the -- that's in poor taste. It's a day after 9-11.' "
And indeed, Beck has a long history of pushing inflammatory and often violent rhetoric. He has suggested that President Obama is trying to "destroy the country," declared that "[m]y tax dollars, your tax dollars" are "going to fund the murder of children," and even called Obama a "racist" with a "deep-seated hatred for white people."
It's clear that Beck is not a "recovering shock jock," but a purveyor of incendiary comments that are all too characteristic of the right-wing media.
They, collectively and individually, play a show, a circus by verbal shocks, glaring contradictions, nonsense - anything to attract and entertain the public.
You fight this circus with a kind of academic rigor, pedantic notes, marking off their excesses and, oh, logical inconsistencies.
But that's a far and wide miss. They are not trying to be logical and consistent. You - you yourself - give their backyard show a weight by treating their entrechat with all seriousness and by implication, respect.
You want to fight down their influence on people? Then laugh it all off, ridicule it, extrapolate their messages to an extreme so that their nonsense becomes visible to the last spectator in the audience.
That is how.
Keith Olbermann is often held up as your mirror image. Do you know one significant difference between you and Olbermann? He doesn't have to take a little time out of every show to remind his audience to be non-violent. Hang up your cleats before something truly unfortunate happens in your name, Glenn.
Everything else aside, this is a small microscopic pin-point of good news in the echo-chamber black hole.
I even heard Van Jones (Van Jones!) give some props to Beck on NPR this past week.
There must be some red kryptonite infecting the media or something.
Could it be because most people don't want our utopia nany state
God knows we need it. As flaming libs ( ooops! Progressive) we must never loose site of our goal to ultimately have someone else take care of us.( owing primarily to our weak nature)
Research shows that us libs (dang it - progressives) we are basically weak dependent types, or what are masters (read George soross)call us; future slaves.
Oh why does no one love us? Why do beck, rush, hanity constantly keep using those meanie facts that hurt our overly sensitive feelings, and prove our arguments so wrong ( probably why their ratings are so high)
Can anyone answer these questions .....lol