Manipulating MLK Day

[barracuda]

Is Beck making a run for the presidency?

If this is any indication, the answer is "yes":

No Beck-Palin ticket in 2012, talk show host says

The pair draw a big crowd at Saturday's rally, but Glenn Beck insists they won't team up to run for office: 'There are far too many people that are far smarter than me to be president.'

I pray these two morons form a coalition and run. It would be the final end of the Republican party.

[mentalgongfu2]

Nordic, the last thing we need is Glenn Beck as a martyr.

[barracuda]

[Nordic]

Nordic, the last thing we need is Glenn Beck as a martyr.

He's be completely forgotten in six months.

[Luther Blissett]

If public education were of a greater quality in this country, we'd never have to hear anything about Glenn Beck.

[NeonLX]

I could very well be wrong, but I don't think Beck/Palin would be a republican ticket. I think they'd go ahead and catapult the tea party into the mainstream. Or maybe it already is the mainstream.

Bring it on, I say. If we can't get any visible alternatives from "the left", let's take what comes down the pike from "the right" (even though all that tea baggery is only faux revolution, sponsored by TPTB).

[82_28]

Beck won't be forgotten in six months. No way. Here's Kunstler's Monday post:

By James Howard Kunstler
on August 30, 2010 9:38 AM

Here come the Corn Pone Nazis!
Fox News entertainer, former drug addict, and professional weeper Glenn Beck took center stage at the Lincoln Memorial exactly forty-seven years to the day after Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech for a rally dedicated to "restoring honor," which is tea party code for the otherwise unutterable idea: get that n*****(ed) out of the White House! (despite the attendance of a few African-American shills on the scene).
Eighty-seven thousand disoriented citizens lined the DC Mall reflecting pool and adjoining lawns to witness Beck overstep his role as a television clown and don the mantle of an evangelist-savior battling the dark forces working insidiously to put the America of WalMart, Walt Disney World, Nascar, and Burger King into the Collapsed Society Hall of Fame -- where it's heading anyway, due to the bad choices these self-same citizens made during an extraordinary bonanza era of cheap oil that is now drawing to a close whether anyone likes it or not. Naturally, Beck invoked prayer against this prospect, which is what people resort to when they don't understand what is happening to them.
Beck himself just seems to be following a career arc more than really answering "a call." The emptiness of his platitudes and the confusion of his ideas shows that he is just flexing his demagogic muscles in a moment when weepy bluster passes for heroism. Ten years ago he was a cringing drunk contemplating suicide. Then he went shopping in America's Mall of Utopias for something to believe in and found Mormonism, a "religion" dreamed up by an imaginative young man on the agricultural frontier of western New York during an earlier age of ferment which -- guess what -- coincided with a decade of economic turbulence. (Anyone interested in the bizarre subject is advised to read Fawn Brodie's excellent biography of Smith, No Man Knows My History [Knoph,1945].)
Of course, what has allowed Beck to occupy center stage is the failure of rational political figures to articulate the terms of the convulsion that American society faces, brought about not by communists and other John Bircher hobgoblins but by the forces of history. The failure at the political center is a conscious one of nerve and will, of elected officials in both major parties playing desperately for advantage in defiance of the truth -- this truth being that the USA went broke trying to swindle itself into prosperity. Add to this the failure of the law to go after the swindlers, which has undermined the fundamental belief in the rule of law that enabled this society to function as well as it did previously.
Barack Obama personifies this failure these days, a politician proclaiming "change" who not only managed to change nothing, but promoted a continuation of the national self-swindling with legislation so dazzlingly prolix and complicated that no one can claim to have read either the Health Care Reform Act or the Financial Regulation bill, the two hallmarks of his tenure so far, neither of which will change anything about how we do these things. Why Mr. Obama has turned out to be such a weenie remains a mystery. Even the former communists at Russia Today laugh at the idea that he is a "communist" or a "socialist" and so do I. He certainly appears to be hostage of the more malign forces in society these days -- the medical insurance racket, the too-big-to-fail banks, the multi-national corporations. But I don't believe it's because he wants to suck up to them, or join their country clubs when his current job ends.
My own guess is that he's been informed that the system is so fragile that if he dares to disturb even one teensy-weensy part of it -- for instance, by throwing some executives from Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, et cetera, into federal prison -- that said system will fly to pieces in a fortnight. So Obama's main task for a year and a half has been to desperately apply baling wire and duct tape to the banking system while telling fibs to the public about a wished-for recovery to a prior state. Unfortunately that prior state is the ecstasy of a self-swindle in the moments before it unravels... the sublime feeling of having gotten something wonderful for nothing. We're beyond that now and nothing on the age-old shelf of nostrums, spells, prayers, and miracle-cures will avail to bring that moment back, though the public does not know this.
This is what allows a faker like Glenn Beck to shine. The masses still truly believe that prayer will save them from bankruptcy, foreclosure, penury, the loss of status, and the cut-off of precious air-conditioning, so Glenn steps onto a national monument like an Aztec priest ascending the Pyramid of Huitzilopochtli to soothe the angry god with worshipful incantations, and incidentally maybe a few dozen sacrificial hearts cut out -- just as the tea-bagger right-wing glorifies the sacrifices of US soldiers blown up by roadside bombs for the sake of American military adventuring in lost causes like the war to turn Afghanistan into a functioning western-style democracy.
Glenn Beck's sidekick nowadays, Sarah Palin, is exactly the kind of corn pone Hitler that America deserves: a badly-educated, child-like, war-mongering opportunist easily manipulated by backstage extremist billionaires who think they don't have enough money yet. Sarah Palin is going to run for president in 2012. In the process she'll turn the sad remnants of the Republican party into a suicide cult, but she might just get elected and you can kiss the 230-year-long experiment in representative government goodbye for good.
In the meantime, the financial markets are getting ready to puke, the housing market has yet a million frauds left to unwind, the commercial real estate and retail sectors are crashing, the projects in Afghanistan, and Iraq, too (despite the current hype about the end of the combat mission there), are set to suck a few billion a day out of the system, indefinitely, and the season leading into the holidays is taking shape as a major amplification of all the converging clusterfucks that make these such interesting times. The tea-bagger faction will only get more desperately crazy as a result.
The bigger mystery in all this -- if I may perhaps engage in some nostalgia of my own -- is: what happened to reasonable, rational, educated people of purpose in this country to drive them into such burrow of cowardice that they can't speak the truth, or act decisively, or even defend themselves against such a host of vicious morons in a time of troubles?

http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/08/one-lump-or-two.html

The wingnut tea party fools are out in force this morning -- should you want to wade into the comments. A far larger contingent of them I would say than normal. People saying things one around here might agree with, but then become apologists for Beck all in the same post. As per that right-wing troll post from last week, you had to know this whole circus was set up for this week to feature many a fascist chameleon on the interwebs. They were ready to go. You knew they were going to be. They probably had target sites lined up well in advance of Beck's preposterous dog and pony show, talking points established, push button terms powerpointed and conversational approach nailed down for the week following the intentional insult to MLK that happened on Saturday. We're not up against independent people who lean fascist anymore like we were in the early aughts. We're dealing with something more centralized, central casting, IMO.

[Simulist]

If Glenn Beck were a character in a novel, the editor would ask the author for a rewrite. "Come on. No one's gonna believe this," she would say.

But we are obliged to believe it, because this is (supposedly) "reality."

This universe's Author needs a better editor. (And I need to find a better "book.")

[Nordic]

It's "The Overton Window" at work. Now, thanks to Beck, people like Hannity and O'Reilly seem downright moderate.

Which is/was the goal.

[norton ash]

Beck and these teabagger shitbags have MILLION$$ backing them.

Meet the Koch brothers. And weep.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010 ... z0xdz60BIQ

[MinM]

Beck and these teabagger shitbags have MILLION$$ backing them.

Meet the Koch brothers. And weep.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010 ... z0xdz60BIQ

http://twitter.com/buzzbissinger/status/22477000525

Beck like Hitler also had the backing of rich industrialists (the Koch brothers) supporting him for their own agenda.

http://twitter.com/buzzbissinger/status/22477454938

Folks, read your history. Beck is egomaniac, but smart egomaniac like Hitler. As economy worsens he will only gain more followers.

http://twitter.com/buzzbissinger/status/22476865927

But like Beck he had the power of rhetoric. He capitalized in a terrible economy just like Beck. they both smell the fear of the masses.

via :: LaRussa & Pujols Attend the Glenn Beck Rally, Buzz Bissinger Stews as St. Louis Cardinals’ Season Burns | The Big Lead


Buzz

[MarkM]

Beck is nothing new. Just watch "A Face in the Crowd"

[yathrib]

I notice they have no problem co opting and domesticating the raw emotional power of black gospel. Still, I see how a sincerely religious person would have a hard time fighting this manipulation, even though it is so political.

[Alaya]

Is Beck making a run for the presidency?

If this is any indication, the answer is "yes":

No Beck-Palin ticket in 2012, talk show host says

The pair draw a big crowd at Saturday's rally, but Glenn Beck insists they won't team up to run for office: 'There are far too many people that are far smarter than me to be president.'

I pray these two morons form a coalition and run. It would be the final end of the Republican party.

[The Consul]

I was taking a dump this morning and I suddenly heard the voice of god. He told me that if I did not believe in him I was his enemy. And that he could enema the enemy, so to speak. He also told me if I played on this theme I could take advantage of a lot of ignorant twerps. There is a difference between being ignorant and stupid, but it helps if you are stupid, then you don't really have to try to believe such crap. Without intelligent greedy bas-tards around to manipulate the ignorant then the difference wouldn't much matter.
So The lord told me my turd was holy, that if I presented it properly I could form a cult around it, and it might even spread to the multitudes, if I had the right marketing and charisma. God told me my vestments could be anything...even a used Ronald McDonald costume, or a weenie dog outfit. The big question is what does my turd mean and how do I relate it to the suffering and salvation of others. Hmmmm, is it the smell, the shape, the texture? Damnit, god cried out inside my brain, we're not talking about cheesecake here, we're talking about a holy relic that can turn people on to god and slather you with limitless, tax free income. The lord has left me with a great challenge. First I have to find some faithful minion to retrieve it out of the shitter. Then I have to go forth, maybe put it on a golden plate, or divide it and put it on two golden plates and tell people if they look at it long enough they will have THE ANSWER. Ooh boy, said god....now you're getting the idea. The idea is to give them an idea that they think they are having and call it....call it....tell me now boy, what you going to call it???!!!! A blinding flash of light exploded through every corner of my being. I know...I know...I will call it....call it...yes, god, yes....Holy.......Shit!!!! This is god's turd, not mine, but divine. Come all ye who are sick and fearful of the evil ways of mamon, come to my Jesus pancake house and if you donated more than 10,000 dollars you get to drop your load in the golden toilet of the loyal soldiers of god. Don't be a fool, a sinner, a loser in the apocolypse. Send MONEY now 1-800-Dum-bass now, before it is too late!!!!