Glenn Beck Is A Bad Journalist And An Asshat

"Latent racism combined with black president make Glenn Beck something-something."
"Go crazy?"
"DON'T MIND IF I DO! BWALALALALALALA!"

I don’t have a problem with Republicans, in and of themselves. There’s nothing wrong with wanting minimal government intervention in your life or being in favor of fiscal responsibility and states’ rights and all that. To be honest, that’s all fairly reasonable stuff to want. I’m personally a big fan of fiscal responsibility myself – a little bit of fiscal responsibility would have gone a long way toward keeping Wall Street from burning down, falling over, and sinking into the swamp.

My problem with the current incarnation of the Republican Party is that over the last 30 years or so they’ve fallen in with the “family values” crowd, and now a lot of big Republican talking points are things like outlawing gay marriage and abortion, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, seeing as the government dictating who can and can’t get married and what women can and can’t do with their bodies is hella intervention in day to day life. It’s this sort of hypocrisy that gets me: I didn’t see an awful lot of fiscal responsibility during the last eight years of Republican rule, as evidenced by the war over nonexistent weapons and the fact that Wall Street did burn down, fall over, and sink into the swamp. Furthermore, a lot of the same senators who are so up on family values are the ones who usually get caught in airport bathrooms or are flying to Argentina for booty calls on the state’s dime.

But then, there’s the conservative pundits. And I think they’re just about the scariest thing on Earth. Sure, hypocritical family-values Republicans who want to impose their so called morality on the rest of the country are no good, but they tend to self destruct pretty quickly because it only takes one minor infraction to destroy their credibility.

Look at Bill ‘O Reilly. Everybody hates him. Hitler would think he was a prick. And that’s not just because of his bullying, tantrum-prone antics on his show or the fact that he sends camera crews out to ambush his opponents. He and Fox News paid a hefty settlement to a female staffer on his show after she sued him for sexual harassment, citing a conversation where he proposed they hop in the shower and rub one another with loofas and falafels.

Can you imagine what this sort of thing would do to a politician’s career? He’d be run out of town on a rail. But Bill O Reilly wasn’t elected. Much like genital warts and diarrhea, Bill O Reilly just kind of showed up, and he won’t go away until he’s good and ready. Negative publicity can kill a politician, but not a pundit – like the robots in The Matrix, they feed off our hate and turn it into ad revenue.

A lot of people pull out Ann Coulter as an example of a conservative pundit they hate, but that’s never made a lot of sense to me. Ann Coulter describes herself as a polemicist, which is literally defined as somebody who says crazy shit to get attention. Her whole game is saying outlandish and offensive things in order to piss people off to the point that they buy her books just to see what crazy thing she’s going to say next. I doubt that she actually thinks that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, much in the same way I doubt that clowns actually think that tiny cars and huge shoes are effective means of transportation and dress. They don’t really buy into it; they do it because they’re good at it and it makes them money.

The reason that I hate Glenn Beck so much is because he isn’t that.

When my parents were childless yuppies living in Seattle in the mid 1980s, they would pass by a homeless man who stood on a downtown corner on their way home. He would pontificate to the passing commuters, without notes, for hours on end about a wide variety of topics, namely the evils of “symptom causing nerve gas and organized religion!” As Mom has described it, he didn’t look out of the ordinary, and if you listened to him for a short period of time he might even seem like a fairly normal guy. But then, if you stopped and listened for a few minutes or more, it would become rapidly apparent that this man was in fact totally batshit insane.

To me, Glenn Beck is that guy, the only difference being that he’s got a big platform and a wide audience that seems to believe what he says. People latch on to his trumped up 9/12 project, in spite of the fact that he publicly criticized the families of 9/11 victims in the past. People nod their heads when he goes on air and agrees that Al Queda should attack America again. People listen when he says Barack Obama hates white people, in spite of the fact that his own goddamn mother is white.

If it was Ann Coulter saying this, I’d be slapping my knee and laughing, toasting her with my Diet Coke, saying, “Oh, Ann – Alec Baldwin is going to pitch such a fit about that on The Huffington Post tomorrow.” But Glenn Beck is Ann Coulter crazy with Bill O Reilly conviction – he says things that have no bearing in common sense and believes in them completely.

Happy ending: Three of Glenn Beck’s sponsors, among them Progressive Auto Insurance and Proctor and Gamble, have pulled their ads from his program thanks to a petition from colorofchange.org. It’s just proof that sooner or later the true crazies will snuff themselves out when people quit throwing change into their hats.

Truman Capps hates that Glenn Beck named his TV show Glenn Beck, because if that sort of thing is okay now he may as well just call his blog Truman Capps.