Beck Lies To Excuse His Attacks On Obama As A Racist

Today on his radio show, Glenn Beck responded to criticism made by Joe Scarborough on MSNBC's Morning Joe:

BECK: When I say that Barack Obama is a Marxist, I actually don't think I say that anymore. I think we said that he was a colonialist, a anti-colonialist, that is getting his dreams from his father.

GRAY: But we backed that up with his own words.

BECK: With his book and everything else. When I say that -- when I said it one time -- I've got to be very careful because I know that people are trying to censor this program. When I used the r-word in response to Barack Obama, I was thinking out loud. I said it at seven o'clock in the morning, without really thinking. I was just kind of like, I'm trying to figure him out.

GRAY: And this was right after he said, let's put it into context. All right, this was considering two things. One, my grandmother is a typical white person, who has a certain reaction to black people bred into her. Now, if anybody else had said that Joe Scarborough would be all over them as a racist. But, it was also.

BECK: Okay. He's a little angry today.

GRAY: It was also when he went off on the cop in Cambridge acting stupidly without any of the facts.

BECK: Right. And I said, so what is he judging on this? And because he said the cops act stupidly. And so I'm seeing that, and I'm thinking, well, these are the patterns of a racist that I have been taught by the media and everybody else that those are the patterns of racism. I immediately apologized for that, and I have updated that and said I was wrong.

Immediately apologized? Well that's not even sort of true. Here's the timeline:

  • Day 1 -- July 28, 2009: Beck appears on Fox & Friends and says: “This president, I think, has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a ”a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture."
  • Day 2 -- July 29, 2009: Beck defends his remark on his radio show: “I deem him a racist based on, really his own standard of racism, the standard of the left.”

Beck's eventual clarification of the comment came weeks later in an interview with Katie Couric, released September 22, 2009. When asked “Are you sorry you said that, at all?” Beck apologized only for “the way it was phrased,” saying that “living in a soundbite world [is] really a nasty place to live.” Beck went on to say that whether Obama is a racist “is a serious question that I think needs serious discussion.”

One time? Also patently false, unless one is willing to ignore the time in June 2010 when Beck misrepresented comments by President Obama -- made during a 1995 interview -- to claim that he did not want to meet with BP CEO Tony Hayward because he is a “white CEO.” Beck called Obama's comments “code language” that “sounds like racism,” “stereotyping,” and “profiling.” One would also have to ignore Beck's suggestion that Obama was sympathetic to the hate speech of the New Black Panther Party because “it's the same kind of hate speech he heard every Sunday in church,” and that he called the NBPP part of Obama's “army of thugs.”

And that's really just the proverbial iceberg's tip. We haven't even addressed Beck's extensive race-baiting or his ridiculous attempt to appropriate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, all of which is documented here.