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?
