Glenn Beck goes after Color of Change co-founder Van Jones

I had never heard of Glenn back until after the election yet he is closest to my views of any radio talk jock today. More than any other radio personality, even including Dennis Prager, Beck thinks thematically rather than episodically, that is, reacting to events. He clearly sees the threat to the nation and pulls together the threads to explain the motivation and methods of the Obama administration. He explores in depth, for example, the relationship between Obama and Acorn and the influence of George Soros and the implications for American liberty and does so in a way that makes the whole pattern plain and understandable.

For those of us who have been calling Obama a Manchurian Marxist since before the election, all of this is very gratifying. That is not to say that Limbaugh is not brilliant at is skewering Obama. Hannity is a great chronicaler of the sins of the administration. Levin also operates thematically and is implacable devoted to liberty and reacts with repugnance to stateism, but he vitiates his credibility with pointless and excessive humiliation of his callers.

On first impression one would not detect that Glenn Beck has a extremely facile mind. He is probably as bright as Levin and carries a great deal of charisma and an unassuming boy next-door kind of likability. In my judgment, Glenn Beck's greatest liability is what I detect to be a tendency towards bipolar excess. A recovering alcoholic, he might be what they describe as on a "dry drunk." This has nothing whatever to do with the quality of this analysis but it does have to do with his emotional stability. I hope and trust that he can `maintain a true course because he represents a very valuable voice for conservatism/libertarianism.

More, he puts together the whole package and illustrates the very real multifaceted threat to our liberties presented by the Manchurian Marxist.

I do take issue with Beck on his persistent and unnecessary lashing out against Republicans when he equates them with Democrats. No one should ask me to take a back seat in the game of criticizing the Republicans including George Bush. I have my posts which I can produce showing that I predicted the defeat in 2006 because the Republicans departed from conservative values. I took a lot of flack for predicting the defeats in 2006 and 2008. For a long time my favorite slap at the Republicans was, "the only thing we learned from the election of 2008 is that we have learned nothing from the election of 2006." I think the party has since learned much of the lesson, although that is not to predict that they will hold fast to their rediscovered truths. But as flawed as the Republicans are, they are infinitely preferable to the modern Democrat party which is infected with a virus of stateism to a degree that it constitutes a real and mortal threat to our constitutional republic.

I part with Beck because he engages in moral relativism when it comes to equating Republicans and their declensions with the truly dangerous threat presented by Democrats. It tells me that Beck misunderstands the nature of the electoral system in America when he tells his listeners to vote for independents. America operates on a two-party system and any deviation from that convention will bring electoral woe to the deviant. I consider that this foolishness is the result of a bent toward libertarianism. The point is not to have fidelity to a business called the Republican Party, the point is that conservatism needs a vehicle to wield political power and there is no viable option exists except the Republican Party which conservatism can exploit to save the Republic.

Otherwise Beck is a great talent and very, very sound.

So true. Obama and his minions are probably trying to throw off any closer scrutiny of their behavoir by throwing out the: ‘it goes back to last year’ canard. That could mean anything. It could mean that a couple of folks slipped by under the Bush Administration’s watch and the bulk of them under Obama’s watch(or approval).

One thing is certain...Obama and his administration are breaking laws every single day and no-one in the state run media is calling them to the carpet or holding them responsible. They are guilty of the most serious ABUSE OF POWER in our nation’s history.

BTW..where are the republicans screaming that this vetting stuff by the WH is UNCONSTITUTIONAL? EVERYTHING OBAMA IS DOING IS UNCONSTTUTIONAL AND NO-ONE IS DOING ANYTHING!!

(not shouting at you...just shouting at the world.)

I basically like Beck because he is a palatable libertarian rather than immured in some hard right wing philosophy.

I have been rather beaten up here because of my opposition to George Bush and his penchant for Rumsfeld's limited war strategy in Iraq.

A Vietnam Vet, I believe in overwhelming force in every consideration of meeting the enemy...a "git thar furstest with the mostest" strategy in beating down foes instead of pussyfooting around them.

The eventual Petraeus surge that put down the insurgents should have been initiated two and a half years prior than it was instead of after "we tuk a thumpin'" in the 2006 mid-term debacle and I'll never for give Bush for his conduct of fighting Operation Iraqi Freedom with a powderpuff rather than a sledgehammer or his "Read My Lips" old man for stopping the first (Operation Desert Storm) drive to Baghdad when American power could have been demonstrated forcefully and fully and perhaps would have meant that 9-11 would have been too deemed too costly for Bin Laden to even try.

Interesting, I describe myself as a foaming at the mouth, flopping on the floor conservative with pesky libertarian tendencies.

I recognize Beck to be a libertarian but I do not understand why he has a reflexive need to equate the truly egregious anti- libertarian policies of the Democrat party with the relatively venal declensions of the Republicans. It strikes me as relativism in reverse which leads to a feeling of secret and smug wisdom for damning both houses.

Anticipating the electoral disaster we were facing last November, I began a series of posts trying to feel a way toward reconciliation between social conservatives and libertarian conservatives or fiscal conservatives.

The problem with the Iraq was that it introduced a third splintering tendency, the neocons. I know libertarians who have walked away from the Republican Party because of the neocons. Now we see the neocons, like Frum, walking away from the social conservatives.

It would take another Ronald Reagan or, as fate would have it, a Barack Obama to restore the party's unity.

I loved Reagan. I loved him for principal but mostly for his Machiavellian tendency to do whatever means necessary when it came to protection of this nation I love. I believe Iran/Contra to be a perfect example...I mean we sold weaponry to Saddam Hussein's republican guard to kill Ayatollah Khomeini's extremists in a war that eliminated thousands of little Islamists and we took the profits from the arms sales to give to freedom fighters waging a war with Ortega's communists in Nicaragua...HELLO! (There was something wrong with that?)

Reagan's SDI determination is now being proven effective as well as his modernization of the armed forces, particularly the Navy. Just google the Aegis weapons systems cruiser/destroyer success in knocking down ballistic missiles...and remember the satellite that was killed a year ago last February? This would not have been done under a GHW Bush, Clinton, G. Bush or an Obama regime.

There is perhaps another Reagan out there but, at present, I don't see him/her. My hopes was McCain to have a catharsis in 2009 as president (I never doubted his military determination only his willingness to abandoned Reaganism for bipartisan accord on taking away some of our liberties) but it was not to be. I don't think its going to be Palin and, so, God Forbid, the Romulan looks like a front runner.

I'm praying now for David Petraeus to test the waters although I know little about him..

If we are to be blessed with another Reagan, I think we will know him instantly when we see him.

Meanwhile, I think we should look for a package of conservative principles rather than a personality. Military heroes do not always make for conservative stalwarts but they do tend to be men of integrity and principle. I think of Eisenhower in this context. I recall the there was a boomlet for Colin Powell here on Free Republic some years ago and I felt that the conservatives who supported him were seduced by a uniform and by a skin color much like the entire American electorate was seduced by Barack Obama's color. Colin Powell is no conservative and his uniform and military bearing never made him one.

I like the looks of Jim DeMint right now but I don't know that much about him or even much of his intentions. Likewise Sarah Palin, I have no idea what her ambitions are. She has unequaled natural political talent, but does she have the discipline? The smartest guy in the running who has proven he knows how to throw the Democrats out of power is Newt Gingrich but he is flawed with personal baggage and some declensions from conservative orthodoxy-at least on the surface. From a purely mechanical point of view I think that Romney should have been the nominee last time around. But his hopscotching has been so blatant that it is unsettling to a thinking conservative. We've been down that road so many times before. Yet compared to McCain, Romney was a reliable conservative but the party nevertheless chose McCain. I posted yesterday in the wake of McCain's calling for bipartisanship on healthcare reform that Senator McCain would greedily eat a steaming pile of dog excrement if one sprinkled a little extract of bipartisanship on it. Yet, McCain was a war hero and that counts a lot among us conservatives who vote in primaries.

We still have time and if the Democrats led by Obama persist in their gihad against the Constitution and the American way of life, a Republican/conservative paladin will emerge because politics and history abhor a vacuum.

The best people I ever met in life wore uniforms. That is not to say there were plenty of turds in the ranks...I was in the submarine service with men who personally had known Jimmy Carter and called him “the worst naval officer” they had ever met. Many people do not know this but he once almost surfaced the USS Trigger under the USS Orikany during a training exercise, nearly costing the lives of the entire crew. It was only the quick action of the chief of the dive that rescued his ass...and he escaped deserved reprimand only because he was one of Hyman Rickover's nukes during the transition from diesel boats to nuclear powered ones.

I am convinced that, despite the hatred on FR for McCain, that he'd have made a much better president than either of the Bushes. I say this because of his arrogance and ego which I believe would have made much more of a difference in beating down the forces of Islam (really crushing them), then re-hiring many of the Baathist Party membership to run the infrastructure--the water works, sewage, electric company, etc., instead of trashing all of them the way GWB let Amb. Bremmer and Rumsfeld do after the downfall of Saddam--remember this is exactly what George Patton did when it came to running his sector in Germany with former Nazi members. IMO this, and the fact there were too few troops to stop the looting and general chaos, led directly to the beginning of the insurgency. There were also too fee troops on the borders in allowing Al Qieda into the country.

I do not know if he would have been as effective as Reagan in forcing bipartisanship, however...and, let us not forget, Reagan FORCED folks such as Tip O'Neil and company go along with him simply because of force of leadership and going directly to the people--it was something that neither of the Bushes were ever able to do.

BTW, it is interesting that you tag yourself after Nathan Forest. It is a shame that most people will always equate him with the founding of the KKK instead of also calling for its disbandment after it became a terror organization rather than a tough political one for Southern rights and violence replaced what had begun as just plain hard-nose politics...however, I do question his war conduct of the Fort Pillow massacre.

I have read your homepage about the Fort Pillow “massacre” and concur that while Forrest was not personally engaged in the killing he was extremely derelict in his duties as the commanding officer. He obviously knew about the atrocities on going ("the men are still a-killin them in the woods") is a part of his after action report.
IMO, Lee would have court-martialed him had he been under the his command in the Army of Northern Virginia. Bragg should have for gross insubordination when he defied his order to link up with Joe Wheeler (whom Forrest despised) after Chicamauga. It was only his superior record in whipping Yankees that consistently got him out of trouble.
It is a sad commentary, I believe, to his outstanding legacy after the war regarding the KKK as hardly anyone knows that he tried hard to disband the group for its violence and terrorism and really originally only helped organized it to counter carpetbagging corruption in the disenfranchised South after the War Between the States, rather than to torture black folks.

History of the period, unfortunately forgets (due to many liberal historians and college professors) that Radical Republicans during the period were as bad, if not worse, than that of some of the Southern after war groups in bullying freed slaves to vote for their candidates (obviously many of the freedmen would have voted for their former masters--if they would have been allowed to run). Such bullying tactics from Radical Republicans ranged from overt physical threats and hints that they and their families would be shipped off to Carribean Islands to threats of moving them from their cabins as former plantations were being grabbed up by carpetbagging speculators (ex-Confederate owners had to pay taxes in gold or yankee greenbacks, which, of course, they did not have). There was also the "40 acres and a mule" graft and bribes as well--which I'm certain you know about it.

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