The Brad Blog: Discredited wingnuts lawyer up with GOP attorneys, blame 'liberal media'
Whiskey Fire: Muck
Brain Rage: How To Report The News
Balkinization: John Yoo's explanation of the purpose of the Torture Memos, and their actual purpose
Justice Watch: Republican obstructionism delays justice
They gave us a republic: Nightowl Newswrap
Many thanks to Blue Gal and Batocchio for their stellar roundup work during my absence
Glenn Beck seems to be increasingly rattled by having been designated by the ADL as the nation's "Fearmonger in Chief" -- though he continues, on his Fox News show at least, to avoid tackling his critics by name. (He's pushed back at the ADL on his radio show, but only briefly.)
Yesterday he went on his show and denounced the unnamed "they" who say he is encouraging violence with his extremist rhetoric (which would decidedly include us). Keying off his softball interview with Barbara Walters -- who never did bring up his serial falsehoods about Walters and her colleagues at The View, oddly enough -- Beck gets all worked up about the toughest point raised in the whole conversation:
Beck: Barbara Walters even played into this nonsense during her interview with me last night on her annual 'Fascinating People' show. Here it is:
[CLIP] Walters: Glenn Beck is somebody who incites people to violence --
Beck: Oh, I've heard a lot --
Walters: -- He is inflammatory, he makes us scared.
Beck: Yeah. People say Glenn Beck is someone who incites people to violence. Yeah, a lot of people are saying that, but what's the evidence?
She also mentioned that I called Barack Obama a fascist. I don't know -- I, I don't think so. Maybe -- I don't think so, I do realize that Media Matters and MoveOn.org now just got an extra grant from Soros and they're moving into hyper-scramble to find, you know, an example. But I don't know if I ever even called him a fascist. I know I've said 'fascistic tendencies' -- sure, the administration is going in this direction.
Actually, what Walters said was this:
Walters: OK, you have said the Obama administration is fascist.
And in fact, that is exactly what he has done -- on multiple occasions, but most notably back on April 1:
Beck: Like it or not, fascism is on the rise. And that doesn't mean the Adolf Hitler kind of fascism. It's fascism with a happy face. I'll explain the exact definition of fascism in a second, and it will boggle your mind.
--
Beck: I looked up the definition of fascism yesterday, and I want to break it down. The first part is: "Where socialism sought totalitarian control of a society’s economic processes through direct state operation of the means of production, fascism sought that control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners." Wouldn't you say this is what's happening with GM right now?
As we noted then, this even included a segment with a time-traveling dime:
How far out to lunch was Beck here? Well, one of the goofier moments in this whole charade came when Beck trotted out the back of an old American dime -- first minted, as Beck says, in 1916 -- which has a fasces, the fascist symbol, on its reverse side:
This is the famed "Mercury dime", which was designed by sculptor Adolph A. Weinman, who won a 1915 competition: "The reverse design, a fasces juxtaposed with an olive branch, was intended to symbolize America's readiness for war, combined with its desire for peace."
Now, the fasces has a long history of inclusion in various parts of American symbology besides just this dime. You can find it in the Oval Office, on National Guard Bureau insignia, on the American flag that flies in the U.S. House, in the Mace of the House of Representatives; on the seal of the U.S. Senate, on the Statue of Freedom atop the United States Capitol building, and on a frieze on the facade of the United States Supreme Court building. Fasces are incorporated into the Lincoln Memorial.
But then, fascism as a political movement was not born until 1919. So for sculptor Weinman to have intended the fasces on the Mercury dime to imply a "fascist" intent, he'd have had to have jumped in a time machine, traveled to the future, met Mussolini, and come back to 1915 with that nefarious design in his head. Somehow I doubt this.
Beck had made the charge even before then, in a February conversation with Laura Ingraham:
...why do Americans care if taxes are raised at all? And why should Americans care about tax cuts also?
As you guys know, I watch the mind numbingly sophomoric Fox Saturday block of Stock Shows that goes by the name of "The Cost of Freedom." They consist of four 30-minute shows, and every single week there's an idiot on who says the only people that pay taxes are the richest members of our society.
OK, let's say I agree. Then why should 290,000,000 Americans more or less give a rip about the ramifications of raising taxes? They make the argument for us that taxes should be raised since only the very rich pay them.
Dave Neiwert wrote about this in one of his earlier posts: Populism: It's all the right-wing rage these days
The Tea Parties, in every incarnation -- from the Tax Day protests to the health-care town halls to the "Tea Party Express" and the "912 March on Washington" to Michele Bachmann's lame "Super Bowl of Freedom" -- has been all about populism, and it is distinctly right-wing populism.
A giveaway moment came during Sean Hannity's April 15 evening "Tea Party" broadcast from Atlanta, when he brought in a live feed from the Rick and Bubba Tea Tantrum in Alabama:
Hannity: And I'm going to tell you one other thing: When did we ever get to a point in America where, we're nearly at the point where fifty percent of Americans don't pay anything in taxes! Nothing!
[Crowd boos]
Rick: The numbers out are just astounding that, that, how much that the very top taxpayers actually pay. I feel like these taxpayers are disenfranchised. I want them to have a share of the burden just like they have a share of the vote.
That's right -- it's the wealthy top percentage of the country that needs a tax break. After all, they are the one Obama's targeting, right? So at least they're being upfront about just who "the taxpayers" are whose interests they're out marching to defend...read on
Don't you feel sorry for these poor rich bastards? If this is their argument, then I say President Obama should impose immediate tax increases like a war tax, a health-insurance tax and a jobs creation tax on the top tier of Americans. Make it a payroll tax and take it right out of their checks every pay period. That would immediately satisfy the deficit scolds.
After all, who will care if it's only the Fox Noise demographic? In the end all conservative policies do is destroy the least of us. They treat the American worker like trained seals, whose only function in life is to fuel their wealth.
I think they tend to make their judgments about the upper and lower classes based as much on tribalism as anything else. (Recall that the populist hero Ross Perot was a billionaire who made his fortune from government contracts -- but he sounded like a good old boy.) These things never play themselves out exactly the same ways but the fundamental appeals remain the same. The upper levels of society usually find a way to pull the strings and control these people, but the more vulnerable often suffer quite a bit at their hands. Neiwert's piece is a very important primer for those of us who are trying to understand where this Palin-Beck teabag phenomenon comes from and how it relates to other right0wing philosophies like Randism and militias. At the end of the day it all translates into ugly know-nothingism that lashes out at everyone but the adherents themselves, who see themselves as the defenders of the Real America.
I get the impulse and I feel the same frustrations. But their solutions are always worse than the problems they seek to solve.
The Amazing Atheist: "Tell The Truth!" (h/t DU)
I've been in a funk this weekend. It's hard to look at the coverage of the 9/12 protests and not come to the conclusion that this country is seriously--and possibly irretrievably--messed up. I'm not even sure that half the country even knows what the truth is any more, or could recognize it if it was standing in front of them. I don't know if it's an unfortunate byproduct of the rough and tumble internet age, but the uninhibited rage scares me. And where is our media now? Trying to temper misinformation and out-and-out lies? Surely, you jest.
As per usual, the Sunday shows will give those out-of-touch-with-reality, anger-management-needing conservatives plenty of air time to confuse Americans. Rep. Joe "The Heckler" Wilson will get to lie some more on Fox News Sunday, Newt Gingrich (yes, again) will be on Meet the Press to spin away, Gang of Six Queen Olympia Snowe will be on Face the Nation and Tenther Gov. Tim Pawlenty will be on This Week. A single intellectually honest discussion of issues to be had? Surely, you jest.
ABC's "This Week" - Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius; Sens. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and Mary Landrieu, D-La.; Gov. Tim Pawlenty, R-Minn.
CBS' "Face the Nation" - David Axelrod, White House senior adviser; Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine.
NBC's "Meet the Press" - Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and John Cornyn, R-Texas; Howard Dean, former national Democratic Party chairman; former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga.
NBC's "The Chris Matthews Show" - Panel: Helene Cooper, Howard Fineman, Joe Klein, Ceci Connolly. Topics: Has President Obama regained control in the health care debate? What is behind the venom President Obama has faced? Meter Questions: Was the anti-Obama venom unavoidable? YES: 6 NO: 6; Has Obama Got Command Back? YES: 12 No: 0.
CNN's "State of the Union" - White House press secretary Robert Gibbs; Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H.; Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va.
CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" - This week - an in-depth look at Afghanistan. The election, the war, the country as a whole. All riddled with problems. What can the U.S. and the world do? We'll speak with two of the Afghan presidential candidates, with Michael Ware who spent a week in the heartland of the insurgency, and with a panel of experts debating the options.
"Fox News Sunday" - Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C.; Sens. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.; Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union.
Viewer note: Barack Obama will make his third appearance on 60 Minutes tonight, talking health care. But until then, what's catching your eye this morning?
Yes, Bill O'Reilly, it really is a crappy thing when major public figures -- or pissant ankle-biters -- can outrageously smear other public figures as "racist" and do so with impunity and repeatedly. That's what BillO was on about last night, anyway.
But no, he wasn't talking about Sonia Sotomayor. She's just a minor figure, after all. O'Reilly was talking about his own august self. Of course.
It was really quite the stomach-churning whinefest. He started off ranting that "my civil rights" and "my rights as an American" had been violated because he's been branded a "racist" on numerous occasions, which he claims is "libel." Then he indulged one of his periodic bully-the-women routines ("My rights were violated here!"), where he had on two female lawyers who proceeded to explain to him that he was full of crap. This, of course, did not sit well with O'Reilly, who ended up shaking his finger at them and accusing them of enabling the destruction of America.
Along the way, he managed to emit some momentous howlers:
If I were a minority, they couldn't do this to me. You know it. You know it, Tonia. If I were African-American like you are, and they started to do all this kind of stuff, I could kill 'em. And that's my point now. White Americans, Miss California, their rights are being violated, at least the spirit of their rights, by these unbelievable attacks, personal attacks.
...
They're attacking people who disagree with them in very personal ways. That's what they're doing. Don't dodge it.
Then, when they pointed out that the same could be said of his own behavior, he flew into a barely contained rage:
Wait a minute! Hold it! Tonia, keep quiet. I don't dish it out, madam. I don't do that stuff. Don't sit here and say I do. ... We don't do that here. Ever.
And then, at the end of the show? His usual segment of "Pinheads and Patriots." The "Pinheads" segment featured Barbra Streisand:
On the Pinhead front, Barbra Streisand's gonna write a book -- about design. It's gonna tell us all about her mansion in Malibu. I just can't wait for that, can you? No truth to the rumor she'll be concentrating on designs in ... Red Square!
That, of course, is only a sampling of the nonstop flow of "attacking people who disagree with them in very personal ways" on The O'Reilly Factor. Indeed, his whole show is built around it.
Every single night on his show, O'Reilly demonizes liberals. It's what he does. His critics are all "far-left loons" and "haters" who he himself has compared on a regular basis to Nazis and the Klan. Guess he doesn't much care for it when the shoe's on the other foot.
