His Beck and call
In "Fox News’s Mad, Apocalyptic, Tearful Rising Star," The New York Times offers a profile of Utah's favorite populist patron saint, Glenn Beck. Hey, he's Mormon.
Following Barack Obama's rise to power, Beck has apparently found a following among the nation's disaffected — and Utah has plenty of them.
Tapping into fear about the future, Mr. Beck also lingers over doomsday situations; in a series called “The War Room” last month he talked to experts about the possibility of global financial panic and widespread outbreaks of violence. He challenged viewers to “think the unthinkable” so that they would be prepared in case of emergency.
Says Beck:The truth is — that you are the defender of liberty. It’s not the government. It’s not an army or anybody else. It’s you. This is your country.
Beck provocatively tells listeners that he can't discover whether rumors that FEMA is setting up concentration camps are true. But tells the NYTimes:
I’m a rodeo clown. It takes great skill.
6 Comments:
I've seen Beck a few times now - his talk borders on sedition. The guy comes across as being mentally unstable. I've heard that he crawled out from the bottom of a bottle. He absolutely comes across as having an addictive personality. Maybe he's just traded the booze for his own ego. You know what they say: "Once an addict, always an addict!"
kv2 hit on something I wonder about: if, during the Bush years, to wonder about/criticize/disparage Bush was treasonous, what does that make calling for uprisings, revolution, armed conflict like Beck, Sean Hannity, Michelle Bachman, and many lesser lights in the reich-wingnutosphere are doing on a daily basis? Sounds pretty seditious to me; I just read that the Missouri state police are being warned about people with third party stickers on their cars, that they might be militia members. Remember Timothy McVeigh? That's what yahoos like Beck are calling for. How can that--as opposed to saying hey!, I don't like Bush--not be treasonous?
I can't tell you how many of my Mormon relatives have said something along the lines that it's "the end times" now that Obama is president.
Those people are Beck's bread and butter.
The end times..... WTF? What rock are you hiding under?
I have never heard a Mormon refer to the last days as "the end times"?...unless he was counting the number of rear ends he was humping in a given time!
Stirring wingnut stew for ratings and political points.
The Crawler remembers Timothy McVeigh (the Oklahoma City bomber) and Eric Rudolph (the Olympic Park Bomber).
Now, Beck joins Coulter, Hannity, Goldberg, Palin, Gingrich, O'Reilly, Malkin, Ingraham, Limbaugh, Bachmann, Cantor, Boehner, Cornyn and McConnell in stirring up the likes of Hitler-fan James Cummings (the would-be dirty bomber in Maine who bought depleted uranium but was killed by his wife in December before he could do damage) and James Adkisson (who stormed into a Unitarian church in Tennessee last July and killed two and wounded four) and who knows who else.
Wrongly figuring he’d die in a blaze of glory, Adkisson wrote a suicide note in which he admitted he was targeting liberals listed in a book written by Bernard Goldberg:
"Know this if nothing else: This was a hate crime. I hate the damn left-wing liberals. There is a vast left-wing conspiracy in this country & these liberals are working together to attack every decent & honorable institution in the nation, trying to turn this country into a communist state. Shame on them....
"This was a symbolic killing. Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book. I'd like to kill everyone in the mainstream media. But I know those people were inaccessible to me. I couldn't get to the generals & high ranking officers of the Marxist movement so I went after the foot soldiers, the chicken-shit liberals that vote in these traitorous people. Someone had to get the ball rolling. I volunteered. I hope others do the same. It's the only way we can rid America of this cancerous pestilence."
The Knoxville News has put all of it on its Web site.
A giant rock called the state of Utah, Harvey. All manner of ignorance is encouraged and applauded. Don't think for yourself, just obey. It's the first law of heaven you know.
To tackle a more intelligent comment, Bill, I think both sides have their crazy fringe elements. Certainly people like Hannity and Coulter help foment the kind of insanity displayed by Adkisson but he would have to be mostly there himself already.
I take solace in the fact that the general public seems to be moderate and ready to call bullshit on either side if it pushes too far.
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