Marching Morons
Aug. 29th, 2010 08:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraI see the latest propaganda out of the GAO is that the stimulus actually worked and that if it weren’t for the stimulus, the US would be looking at unemployment figures in the mid-teens.
Would you like some more grape Kool-Aid?
No? Well then, I gotta tell you – I went to graduate school for three years to learn how to lie with statistics. It ain’t so hard.
Some of you know my guilty secret: I listen to rightwing talk radio. I listen to rightwing talk radio a lot. I listen to a lot of NPR too, of course, but that goes with my demographic profile.
And I have to say: I like Rush Limbaugh. No, I don’t agree with 80% of what he says… but there is that 20%. I’m sure that Rush Limbaugh is the reason I was the first kid on my block to get off the Barack Obama bandwagon. His critiques of Obama as ineffectual, robotically repetitive, and in way over his head rang true – although no, I don’t buy that it’s all part of some underlying socialist scheme to redistribute wealth, I think it’s merely that Hillary Clinton was right: Obama’s lack of experience in the face of a financial crisis of epic proportions is damning.
Glen Beck, though, is a different story. You want the skinny on Glen Beck, go watch Eli Kazan’s masterpiece A Face In the Crowd. (Watch A Face In the Crowd anyway just to see Sheriff Andy and Matlock as a bad guy!) Beck is fucking insane and that makes him dangerous.
It is with great apprehension therefore that I read this morning the accounts of Glen Beck’s march on Washington yesterday.
“America today begins to turn back to God,” he told the crowd – variously estimated as 300,000 to half a million strong.
That’s a lot of nutcases willing to spring for gas.
Fight fundamentalism with fundamentalism?
When future historians chronicle this period of time, does Glen Beck become a footnote or a character of Hitlerian proportions?
Would you like some more grape Kool-Aid?
No? Well then, I gotta tell you – I went to graduate school for three years to learn how to lie with statistics. It ain’t so hard.
Some of you know my guilty secret: I listen to rightwing talk radio. I listen to rightwing talk radio a lot. I listen to a lot of NPR too, of course, but that goes with my demographic profile.
And I have to say: I like Rush Limbaugh. No, I don’t agree with 80% of what he says… but there is that 20%. I’m sure that Rush Limbaugh is the reason I was the first kid on my block to get off the Barack Obama bandwagon. His critiques of Obama as ineffectual, robotically repetitive, and in way over his head rang true – although no, I don’t buy that it’s all part of some underlying socialist scheme to redistribute wealth, I think it’s merely that Hillary Clinton was right: Obama’s lack of experience in the face of a financial crisis of epic proportions is damning.
Glen Beck, though, is a different story. You want the skinny on Glen Beck, go watch Eli Kazan’s masterpiece A Face In the Crowd. (Watch A Face In the Crowd anyway just to see Sheriff Andy and Matlock as a bad guy!) Beck is fucking insane and that makes him dangerous.
It is with great apprehension therefore that I read this morning the accounts of Glen Beck’s march on Washington yesterday.
“America today begins to turn back to God,” he told the crowd – variously estimated as 300,000 to half a million strong.
That’s a lot of nutcases willing to spring for gas.
Fight fundamentalism with fundamentalism?
When future historians chronicle this period of time, does Glen Beck become a footnote or a character of Hitlerian proportions?
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no subject
Date: 2010-08-29 01:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-29 02:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-29 06:16 pm (UTC)Don't people realize his is first and foremost nothing more than an 'entertainer'!
no subject
Date: 2010-08-29 03:03 pm (UTC)I agree. I also like to listen to a lot of stuff not expected of my demographic. Limbaugh has always struck me as being akin to a WWF wrestler. He knows much of what he says and does is purely to play to the crowd. Same with 'that woman' Ann Coulter. But Beck is indeed another kettle of rapidly decaying fish. His recent inclusion of a high content of religion is part power play, part indicative of his deepening lunatic leanings and desire to re-write history books. He also worries me, especially when I read comments like 'Beck has taught me more about US history and constitution in the past year than I learned in the previous 50'.
As for Obama. I'm still cutting him some slack. The economic crisis was in full effect when he took the reins, and I'm not sure what could anyone else would have to make the outcome better than it is/was, even with hindsight. Or at least I don't think HIllary or McCain would have come up with anything much better.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-29 03:58 pm (UTC)Really, it should have addressed the needs of small businesses without the Wall Street intermediary, maybe by assigning a bigger pot of money to the SBA. That's just one mechanism -- there are others.
Yeah, Limbaugh is WWF all the way! And doesn't he sound exactly like W.C. Fields?
no subject
Date: 2010-08-30 08:54 pm (UTC)I know a few people who came out 'good' as a result of the economic growth the stimulus bill created. But, they went from being bloody well paid to really bloody well paid. The sort of people who can buy pretty much anything the want anyway, so doubling their salaries doesn't make them spend more. I think the notion of 'trickle down' was flawed, and really didn't pan out. Giving a struggling small business more money clearly would have had much more of an impact.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-29 03:04 pm (UTC)As for Beck's 'Black Robed Regiment'...... what the fu....
no subject
Date: 2010-08-29 04:05 pm (UTC)I realize you (being a kinda, sorta academic) probably have a lot to read already. But if you ever have time for an outside book and would like to get the real skinny on America's crackpots, I highly recommend Fawn Brodie's biography of LDS founder, Joseph Smith. It's a masterpiece.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-29 06:14 pm (UTC)He was perhaps one of the greatest manipulators of people....ever. His understanding of the 'human condition' and psychology was astonishing. The fact that his legacy is - I read somewhere - still the fastest growing religion in the country is a testimony to his 'genius'!
no subject
Date: 2010-08-29 06:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-30 08:45 pm (UTC)Now that you've pointed it out I have to read it...... I've got some long flights coming up, I'll read it during those and let you know what I think of it.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-29 08:54 pm (UTC)case in point, the midwestern floods of a few years back which, according to Rush, "dwarfed anything I saw in Katrina.'
credibility=zero.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-29 09:15 pm (UTC)I will say though... I didn't see Katrina. I only know what I read in yr journal -- today's entry practically moved me to tears by the way -- and what I saw on TV. That was horrific.
But I did get to see the aftermath of some pretty devestating midwestern floods when I traveled last summer with the circus. The route took us right through the flood plain. I wouldn't compare the two disasters even if I could. But the midwestern flooding was bad -- it wiped out whole communities, ruined lives. And it went virtually unreported upon. Make of that what you will...
no subject
Date: 2010-08-29 11:23 pm (UTC)His whole act runs on resentment. The guy is poison.
p.s.
Date: 2010-08-29 11:29 pm (UTC)Rush is also one of the prime peddlers of the "black savages running amok" meme (and it's mirror opposite; the good (read 'white') folks in the Midwest who pluckily rebuilt themselves without waiting for government handouts). People died miserable deaths because of that bullshit fearmongering. I'd happily kill the fat bastard with my bare hands behind that alone.
Re: p.s.
Date: 2010-08-30 12:41 am (UTC)At least in the case of the Midwest, it wasn't incompetence and mendacity that sold them out. Every system wears out eventually. No appreciable sums have been spent in maintaning the infrastructure in this country since the 1980s. It's what we gave up in order to sustain Reagan's tax cuts.
Re: p.s.
Date: 2010-08-30 01:43 pm (UTC)That was my second thought at the time, "if those poor bastards are dealing with the same bunch of insurance weasels as we are, they're fucked.' so, you know...I'm not in the least surprised. And incompetence and mendacity can extend to not properly maintaining existing systems. When I was living in New York in the late 70s, they closed sections of the West Side highway because it was literally falling down, and the 59th street bridge was an accident waiting to happen. Politicians love to build stuff because cutting the ribbon on it is a great photo op, but they hate maintainance because it involves spending tax money on stuff you can't see. When money was spent on bridges in NYC in those days, it was for a paint job. Meanwhile the damn things were rusting from the inside out. Fortunately saner heads prevailed and it was fixed.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-30 02:03 pm (UTC)Really? It was on national news every day there for a while, lots of shots of plucky midwesterners throwing sandbags and arial footage of flooded farmland. It seemed to me (and this may be just my perspective down here) that it actually got more coverage than warranted, given the modest (by comparison) loss of life and property. And for a few years there I really came to dread any kind of disaster that could conceivably be compared to Katrina, because there was (and is) a significant constituency among the punditocracy who like to draw egregious equivalents and crow about how much better other (white) people elsewhere deal with these kinds of things. The implication is that New Orleanians sat on their fat, welfare-chisselling backsides in front of the superdome demanding that 'the government' come by and pick them up and take them to a free hotel, whereas the good folks of the midwest (or California, where the wildfires had Californians put up in a sports stadium with rock bands and free chair massages and stiltwalkers to entertain them, rather than ankle deep in human shit) banded together and helped each other out with a good old fashioned barn raising.
It just shows a really serious lack of understanding of what happened here. The reason the story SHOULD have got monster coverage was because it was and is unprecendented in American history. One of our cities was, for all intents and purposes, destroyed and abandoned, reduced to a ghost town, not a ghost town in the midwest that formerly had 1200 residents, but a modern city of over a million people, all gone. In the California wildfires something like 600 homes were burned, again, a tragedy if yours is one of them, but small potatoes compared to the 180,000 rendered uninhabitable here. The fact that Limbaugh would assert this was 'dwarfed' by the midwest flooding would be laughable if it wasn't so clearly mendacious, and so obviously designed to demonize New Orleanians in comparison to 'real' (white) Americans. It's one the many glaring examples of the evil that is Rush. Glenn Beck is a kook, the 21st century version of Howard Beale. I'm not saying he's not dangerous because he is, but Rush Limbaugh is straight up evil. He has gotten very rich by carefully and deliberately cultivating hatred against 'liberals,' and there should be a special place in hell for him because of that.
I'm also somewhat less than thrilled that he is subsidized with my tax dollars.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-30 02:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-31 04:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-31 10:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-31 09:59 pm (UTC)I just take issue that you mention him with Hitler. I just wonder why the revisionists always make Hitler a creature of the right when that is not true. Now,I wouldn't have problems if you compared him to Franco:)
Interesting how people put Limbaugh in Beck's category when that is so untrue. That's like putting every liberal pundit in Randi Rhodes column and that would be unfair. Sure, Rush has devices to get his audiences riled up, but so does Olbermann. All sides play thesde stupid games, but the left feels comfortable with using invective and bad manners because they are never wrong.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-01 12:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-01 12:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-31 10:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-01 12:03 am (UTC)