Glenn Beck: The end of America is nigh, maybe

I wasn’t going to respond to the responses to my post from early this morning, but DeathToMediaHacks seems to have hijacked the thread and gone off on some specious argument about slavery. Time to get things back on-topic, I guess.
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If you have a beef with something Beck is saying, can you be specific here and point it out? I seriously doubt you can, which makes all of your arguments moot.

cannonball on February 22, 2009 at 10:06 AM

No beef whatsoever with what Beck’s saying. My beef is in the manner and style that he uses to say what he’s saying. Glenn is utilizing the age-old method that Libs/Dems/Progs have used for four or five decades: The sky is falling! He also plays the “what if” game to the extreme, another far Left tactic.

I’ve watched the Dems/Libs/Progs play these games every single time they wanted to ram legislation through that suited their agenda, from environmental causes to anti-war causes to even smoking taxation, and of course, to raising taxes. Everything becomes a crisis, and every Liberal doomsayer crawls out of the woodwork. Obama is a prime example of every single one of these tactics, because he had a humongous spending bill he wanted to get passed, and the only way to do it at the level he was going for was to make the rest of us scared to death of the impending (he said) collapse of our nation and economy.

He spent days scaring us half to death with the notion that each moment we delayed enacting his stimulus plan millions more would become unemployed and the economic collapse would be far worse than it could be if the stimulus plan were in place right away. Then Barry goes off on a four day weekend holiday, with an attitude that the signing of the passed bill could just wait until he was done having his Valentine’s weekend fling with his wife. Some crisis, huh?

Glenn Beck uses the same tactics. Well, we can play ‘what if’ games until the end of time, and over the next thousands of years every single prediction, from economic disasters to depressions to recessions to even major meteors falling from the sky, will eventually happen. But looking back over the past 50 years, how many dire predictions have we heard and waited to happen, only to watch the ‘date certain’ come and go with no actual occurrence?

Remember that a portion of California was going to drop off into the Pacific Ocean? Remember how many ‘end of the world’ predictions came and went? How many more are we waiting on now? Wasn’t Armageddon, the various predictors of which included the bible and even Nostradamus, supposed to result in worldwide nuclear war in 1999?

There were so many predictions during my 60 years of lifetime, with dire consequences that didn’t come true, including a new ice age, that I’ve come to completely discount anyone making such predictions. Glenn Beck is simply another ‘prophet of doom’ in my assessment.

The only thing he’s dead-on about, as my SO rightly points out, is what’s happening to Mexico and our southern border. But that’s not a “what if” scenario. It is, in fact, already happening, and anyone with half a brain could see the things that Beck is seeing in that regard.

Yes, we’re stockpiling a reasonable amount of stuff as well, just in case the worst case scenarios do happen. But there’s ample indicators that it’s the wisest thing to do, from inflation heating up (better to buy durable products or products with long shelf lives) which makes it smart to buy with today’s current dollars which are temporarily worth more and can buy more, and other smart actions to prepare for the foreseeable future’s economic downturn.

But anyone who has lived through past recessions and layoffs and such, who has learned the lessons of history, would do the same. Heck, I had to walk away from my home in 1992 when it was so devalued during that recession that the mortgage was thousands more than its value, with no hope of recovering the equity. After losing our businesses as well, the only thing to do was abandon ship and start over fresh.

Having been there and done that and owning several T-shirts, I’ve learned how to survive and start over. The last thing I think that’s needed in this current economic “crisis” is people running around like Chicken Little, spewing dire predictions and scaring people into taking rash and ill-thought-out actions.

Reasonable discussions and intelligent planning and actions are what’s needed. Sorry, I don’t intend to end up like Gretchen Carlson, hiding under the coffee table because I’ve been scared so badly and expect the sky to fall any minute.

Glenn Beck has a new TV show that needs to get good ratings for his show to continue to charge premium advertising dollars to make it a financial success for Fox. Whatever Glenn has to do to make that happen, that’s what he’ll do. If that makes me seem cynical, so be it. I call it being pragmatic.

I’m not a Democrat or Liberal because I despise their tactics and means of keeping people cowed and voting for them. By the same token, I won’t allow Glenn Beck’s use of those same tactics to reduce me to a quivering mass of scared hysterical mush, like it did to Gretchen.

Effective communication, intelligent discussions concerning the current events and ‘crises’, and intelligent and rational planning, followed up by reasonable common sense actions to deal with them, are the things that, historically, work the most effectively long term.

Bottom line: You won’t find my picture posted on Glenn Beck’s wall. Obama globe-trots to find the mindless adoring crowds to feed his ego. Glenn Beck, although hailing from the opposite end of the political spectrum, also has his adoring crowds, only he won’t have to globe-trot to find them. They’re already there, tacked on his wall, where all he has to do is swivel in his chair to gaze out on them. Bleah!

KendraWilder on February 22, 2009 at 2:56 PM