Another Glenn Beck Brainstorm
There is no denying Glenn Beck's great popularity with many Americans who see themselves as conservatives. Joe Carter of First Things recently offered a reminder of why this popularity is unfortunate. In an appearance on Bill O'Reilly's program, Beck denied that legal recognition of gay marriage would harm the United States and stated, "I believe what Thomas Jefferson said. If it neither breaks my leg nor picks my pocket, what difference is it to me?" To Beck, the redefinition of the bedrock institution of human society is apparently of less concern than the fasces found in American architecture from the 1920's.
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I still cant get over his 'Black Founders' show that he did not once but twice.
Glenn Beck not only illuminates that old problem of the half-educated pontificating on subjects they really doesn't understand, he also presents that soft underside of certain conservatives who have marinaded too long in the current nihilistic and anti-Christian popular culture. They not only have no solutions for the cultural squalor, they are a major part of the cultural squalor. Morally, Beck is a David Frum who can motormouth for three hours a day. He is a David Brooks with a ghost writer.
Boy, the mainstream media Conservative Circus merits its ringmasters: Beck the Great, Goldberg the Wise, and Rush the Benevolent. Truly gods on the national stage. Next week Beck will argue that fascist gravity impedes the liberty of free movement.
"Morally, Beck is a David Frum who can motormouth for three hours a day. He is a David Brooks with a ghost writer."
Yes, this true and a good example of the left using the "rightest"for their won ends. Imagine if BEck's spot was hosted by Clyde Wilson on the American Civil War, Tom Fleming on "The Real Absence in American Education, Pat Buchanan on Foreign Entanglements, Father Hugh Barber, On the Nicene Creed?, Trifkovic, "77 days over Kosovo, Chilton "The National Review That Once Was" or any number of other mild examples to just even the playing field in the name of honest diversity. Would it work? Heck yes!! Would it be allowed? HELL NO!!
Didn't Jefferson believe that sodomites should be castrated?
Bruce,
Yes, Jefferson did favor harsh criminal penalties for the very conduct Beck uses Jefferson to justify. But "Beck the Great," to use Matt Roberts' appropriately derisive term, has spoken, and sadly many will listen.
"O’REILLY: But let’s take the gay marriage deal. Big ruling in California. You really didn’t cover that much, right?
BECK: Nope.
O’REILLY: Why?
BECK: Because honestly I think we have bigger fish to fry."
He could have simply said, "It's my show, and I'll talk what I want to talk about"? I wonder why he took the Irishman's bait. One may as well have asked, "All that black-on-black crime and decline of black family in California. You really didn't cover that much, right?" What kind of a question it is to ask why someone did not do something.
Pfft. Silly TV pundits.
Prateek Sanjay, the exchange reads like something that's fairly common on both radio and TV talk shows. Before the show starts, the host asks the guest if there's anything he'd like to talk about. Then, in the course of the show, the host brings it up casually, as if it's his idea, and the guest gets his few minutes to discuss it.
Beck may well have wanted to get his views on the California ruling out there without using his own show and causing people to turn it off. In other words, O'Reilly may have been serving Beck, not baiting him.
Could it be that John McLaughlin's temper tantrums are scripted?
Needless to say Beck's knows his audience and honest enough to admit what Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly cannot: I'm an entertainer. I'm a rodeo clown.
"I’m an entertainer. I’m a rodeo clown."
Yes, and the good clown does his job of distracting the raging bull while the crowd laughs and the rider escapes to safety. It is much the same on talk radio and television, the clown distracts the disgruntled victims, the duopoly laughs from around the arena, and the rider escapes safely.
Glad to see someone besides myself noticed this statement of Beck's.
I lost any respect for him that night. He revealed himself (once again) as a revolutionary leader who stops short of leading when he realizes that he's ended up in the front line.
Beck was a coward on O'Reilly. Nothing more. He's more worried about making leftists mad than he is about defeating them. Especially when money might be involved.
Just yesterday, beck denounced slavery as evil and claimed it was a policy of genocide sponsored by the government and likened it to genocide of indIANS
Wow, Beck is a squish. Saying slavery is evil, and thinking that same-gender marriage (involving perhaps 0.1% of the population) is not the end of western civilization. Conservatives these days...
Glenn Beck? What is the draw to this loon?
Notice how (in re #14) in America all you have to do is pretend that something is universally accepted (e.g. the evils of slavery) and then move on. Noone actually has to know anything, much less frame an argument.
Jack, the Conservative Movement, as it is fancifully proclaimed by some, has failed in conserving anything in living memory.
Beck's appeal to vague, utopian values is a symptom of the wider neoconservative mentality which leaves no room for cultural pessimism but seeks to readapt conservatism to the prevailing liberal paradigm. The aim of this philosophy is not to preserve any relics of the old world but to temper the new world by selling it old habits vulgarized by the rapping of a post-modern mentality. Idiocy and vulgarity sells well in the modern world and the sale of conservatism is no exception to this rule. While Glenn Beck is busy selling conservatives as the true heirs of equality, Megyn Kelly is lecturing about the revealing attire in PETA advertizements and at the same time wearing a miniskirt. Equality sells as well as sex.
Beck,like so many mainstream conservatives, tries to have it both ways i.e. invoking Martin L. King in one breath, then pledging reclaim America from the very forces that unleashed King in the first place.