Posted on 09/03/2009 4:11:14 AM PDT by IbJensen
Does Glenn Beck really mean to incite the assassination of the president of the United States or is it that he just doesn't care much one way or another? Hey, it's TV, and ratings matter, you know.
In case you've been lucky enough lately to be passing time in one of our meager groves of sanity, know that Beck is the latest Fox News cable sensation, a right-wing near lunatic of such inspired loopiness that his ratings are challenging even the network's reigning act, Bill O'Reilly.
Could it be that O'Reilly, with his hoary shtick of bullying arrogance and mewling pettiness, is beginning to come across as a bit of an old fogy? If so, the network has a comer in Beck.
Beck recently endeared himself to the nation's new secessionists by declaring that President Obama is ``a racist'' with a ``deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.''
And while the 1933 Reichstag fire in Berlin may not be haunting you personally, Beck has been fretting about it -- loudly -- on your behalf. The Reichstag was Germany's parliament and its building was torched maybe by communists, maybe by Nazis -- or maybe by fireflies, for all anyone really knows.
Whatever the case, Hitler used the apparent sabotage as an excuse to seize total power just weeks after his election.
This wouldn't seem, offhand, to have a whole lot to do with America in 2009, but Beck has been railing about it on his TV and radio shows. Yes, he has a radio show, too, and books. The fellow has more soap boxes than Procter & Gamble.
Obama, Beck claims, is plotting to create a Democratic Party dictatorship and he and other Democrats are just waiting for, if they are not actually planning, some Reichstag-like event as a triggering mechanism. Beck is urging his listeners to pray for more time in hopes an aroused citizenry will stop Obama before we lose our freedom. Let us, instead, pause and parse.
Hitler assassination fantasies play to one of history's great what-ifs -- what if someone had just killed him before he consolidated power? A variation is featured in the current movie Inglourious Basterds.
So what is Beck up to? Given his true-believer listeners and the rough trade in Fox's audience, Beck and Fox are playing with matches in an ammo dump.
Already, crazily, we see Obama-as-Hitler placards bobbing in anti-Obama rallies. We have armed show-offs strutting around the perimeter of the president's public events brandishing firearms, including even semi-automatic military-style weapons. We have people sporting T-shirts with Thomas Jefferson's comment that ``The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,'' a sentiment its wearers both proclaim and misunderstand. And in a ceaseless campaign, radio talkers and bloggers tutor their listeners and readers to distrust every established constitutional office and institution of governance.
The sheer goofiness of American politics can be fun most of the time -- its clowning candidates, wacky policy pitches. From the start we've used our politics as much for entertainment as for actually getting anything done, though when push has come to shove we've usually settled down and seen the real work through.
A number of today's political games are different. The knives that are out aren't stage props. The rhetoric, going beyond overheated, scalds. Patriotism is being dumbed down to hating government. Trust and comity are scoffed at as a sucker's buy.
An increasingly clamorous fringe is counting on the shrugging indulgence of a timorous majority to nurture its hysterias with indifference. The sufferance so far suggests, worryingly, that the bet may be well placed.
There's nothing funny, Teepen, about the current administration and there's nothing funny on your part of falsely accusing Glenn of incitement. You're, as usual, carrying water for those 'progressives' (Communists) who are intent on the destruction of this nation.
When did Beck advocate this?
I haven’t heard it.
I wonder how many of these leftard writers are hoping to incite violence against Glenn Beck.
“Beck recently endeared himself to the nation’s new secessionists by declaring that President Obama is ``a racist’’ with a ``deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.’’
Well, duh.
Did this guy read his books?
Listen to the audio where O said it himself?
And his “Reverend” ???
And everyone around him.
Geeeeeez all of this was known well before the election -—— didn’t matter.
Tom Teepen = ‘useful idiot’
So, ratings=loopiness.
This must be from the MSNBC school of Broadcast Ratings Success.
Neither have I.....but I have heard Olbermann come close with Bush (and yet not a word from these people!)
Not to mention that all the violence seems to coming out of the FAR LEFT WING....Malkin does a great job of documenting this...
They’re doing to Glenn what they did to Rush in 1995 & the Oklahoma city Bombing. Clinton and the media tried to pin that act of hate on Rush because he “incited” the bombers to action. If something diabolical does happen, Beck will be a convenient target & talk radio will be said to need restrictions. They are doing it now, but some sort of emergency will really help it along. The “media” don’t seem to realize this will have implications for their freedom of press too.
So pointing out ways in which the current occupant of the WH might be a danger to the freedom of Americans is the same as advocating his assassination?
There are no other ways to stop Obama from subverting the constitution than to assassinate him? Is that what this “journalist” is saying?
Or is he saying that it’s freakish madness to accuse a President of subverting the constitution? Let’s say, no president has been accused of doing THAT since... well... you’d have to go all the way back to the LAST PRESIDENT!
So those who worried that Bush was “trashing the constitution” (exact words of many of his critics) were advocating his assassination?
Is that what this “journalist” is saying?
(And of course, no one ever drew parallels between a President of the United States and Adolf Hitler. You’d have to go back to... well, let’s see... the LAST PRESIDENT to find such parallels.)
Well, they're certainly hoping to get him shut down. They want him silenced one way or the other.
Ordinary lefties are the ones at risk. The president is protected but the ordinary moonbat is not.
Last one out of Miami bring the flag!
Teepen is all wee weed up about Beck.
He doesn’t offer any actual evidence to back up his wink-wink allusions, but he’s panty-twisted anyway.
Tom Teepen is a known leftist hack.
He called President Bush’s actions unconstitutional
Just do a search “tom teepen” and Bush and you will find a slew of articles far more hysterical than anything Glenn Beck has purported.
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