On today's edition of his radio show, Glenn Beck and his sidekick Pat Gray criticized CNN Host and Time editor Fareed Zakaria for comments suggesting that the U.S. Constitution was not perfect. Zakaria made the comments during an interview with PBS' Charlie Rose earlier this week. (This was part of Beck's long-running attack on Zakaria who once pointed out that a claim Beck was making was “total nonsense.”)
Gray claimed that Zakaria had “a skewed view of America,” which Beck suggested he got “directly from George Soros.” Gray also argued that Zakaria is “a guy who immigrated here” from India and has “Muslim parenthood,” but “disparage[s] the country that helped him” make “hundreds of thousands a year, millions.”
If Beck disagreed with Gray's invocation of Zakaria's ethnicity, religion, and immigrant status, he certainly did not express it during the segment.
Watch:
GRAY: Hey, excuse me Fareed, you've got a pretty skewed view of America here. Wow.
BECK: Fareed, how much of this did you get directly from George Soros?
GRAY: And how much from Karl Marx?
[...]
BECK: People don't even argue the Constitution anymore. They don't even know the Constitution. They don't know who these founders were. Fareed, come on, you want to go head to head? Let's do it brother. Let's talk about the founders. Want to go head to head?
GRAY: That would be great.
BECK: I bet this guy doesn't even know the facts on the founding fathers.
GRAY: How does a guy who immigrated here from -- was it India? I think India. He's got Muslim parenthood and he comes here and he enjoys incredible success. The guy's a national television host and a best-selling author. He probably makes if not, many hundreds of thousands a year, millions a year and all he can do is disparage the country that helped him get there.
BECK: That's the same thing with Barack Obama.
GRAY: That provided the opportunity for him to get there.
BECK: Barack Obama.
GRAY: Barack Obama. The same thing.
BECK: Excuse me, Michael Moore. Michael Moore.
GRAY: Same thing.
BECK: Michael Moore. He grew up poor and look at the wealth he has. Only in America and these guys always disparage.
A video highlighting Zakaria's comments was also posted on Beck's website, TheBlaze.com, under the title “AMERICA IS GM CIRCA 1975: OBAMA BUDDY FAREED ZAKARIA BEMOANS PAROCHIAL AMERICANS LOVE OF THE FOUNDERS & CONSTITUTION AS THE REASON WE CAN'T LEARN TO BE BETTER LIKE OTHER COUNTRIES”.
No matter what anyone thinks of Zakaria's statements about the Constitution, Zakaria's ethnicity, immigrant status, and religion are completely immaterial to the argument Beck and Gray are making.
This, of course, is not the first time that Beck (or in this case his sidekick) has dabbled in racial explanations for people's views. Beck previously accused Barack Obama of having "a deep-seated hatred of white people" and conspiring to push a “liberation theology” which he picked up from “his grandfather or father.”
Beck also failed to share the comments Zakaria made on his experience in America during the closing of his interview with Charlie Rose. These comments are indeed relevant if Beck wants to paint Zakaria as "a guy who bad-mouths America every step of the way." During the segment Zakaria stated: “I like to think that I would still come here because I still believe in this country. I still believe that there is such an enormous sense of freedom and opportunity and freedom to be whoever you want and the canvas is so large.” Zakaria then added “I fell in love with this when I came here.” From PBS' Charlie Rose (via Nexis):
CHARLIE ROSE (host): So if you came here as an 18-year- old today in 2011, do you think you would stay here or would you get that very fine education and probably go back to India where your parents still live?
FAREED ZAKARIA (guest): You know it's a tough question. I like to think that I would still come here because I still believe in this country. I still believe that there is such an enormous sense of freedom and opportunity and freedom to be whoever you want and the canvas is so large.
Intellectually it is so stimulating. I fell in love with this country when I came here. I was not -- I came from a middle-class family. I wasn't rich but I didn't come here out of desperation economically. So I think that there's still an enormous amount that this country has to offer. It's still creating this extraordinary thing.
You go to an American company and you see this all t time. Blacks, whites, people of Chinese American descent, Latinos all working together, men, women, nobody cares where you come from. Reagan had this great line “Americans don't care what your origins are, they care what your destination is.”
And I think as long as we can be that kind of country is open to the world's ideas, its cultures, its people, and try to take that as an enormous advantage will be distinctive, will be unique. Will we have the kind of unrivaled dominance that we have from 1989 to 2005? No, but that was one moment in American history.
America has been a vibrant fascinating, challenging, interesting country and a trendsetter in the world. Even before that when there was a Soviet Union and British Empire and a German Empire, and so people shouldn't think just because we can't be in the position we were, the Rome of the world, we will somehow be finished, we won't. America has an enormous amount to offer and will play a central role in this world as long as we can adapt to it and as long as we don't find change. The great danger here is that we close ourselves off to these currents of change and then you become irrelevant to this new world.
Moreover, if Beck or Pat Gray actually watched Zakaria's show GPS or read his columns, they would learn that Fareed Zakaria is not a Marxist but classifies himself as a “Reaganite.”
Beck's personal conflict with Zakaria began last year when Zakaria challenged a statement by Beck made on his radio show in which he stated that 10 percent of Muslims are terrorists. Zakaria called Beck's analysis “total nonsense” and “off by 1,000 percent.” The challenge immediately drew sharp criticism from Glenn Beck.
It is ironic that Glenn Beck attacked Zakaria for being critical of the United States, considering that Beck himself makes his living by promoting conspiracy theories about what the United States is doing. However, since Beck is neither an immigrant nor a child of Muslim parents, he probably finds no problem with his own criticisms of our nation.