Glenn Beck and the Unforgivable Curse

posted at 12:15 am on August 19, 2009 by Doctor Zero
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Radio and television host Glenn Beck finds himself confronting an advertiser boycott, organized by people who don’t watch his show anyway. The primary effect of the boycott will be denying advertisers like Best Buy, CVS, and Travelocity access to Beck’s immense and rapidly growing audience. (By the way, one of the participating advertisers is GMAC. Don’t we taxpayers own five or six billion dollars worth of GMAC? Something tells me the boycott supporters include a far larger percentage of people who don’t pay any federal income tax than Beck’s audience does. GMAC should require permission from actual taxpayers before it’s allowed to engage in a silly boycott that could damage its profitability, and devalue our five billion dollar investment.)

The comment that got Beck in hot water involved calling President Obama a racist, who has “deep-seated hatred for white people of the white culture.” Calling any liberal a “racist” is the Avada Kedavra of political discourse, the Unforgivable Curse. Admittedly, it seems like an unprovoked act of rhetorical aggression. It’s not like Obama and his party have been running around calling everyone who disagrees with them racists, mindless drones, un-American traitors, Nazis, assassins, or Astroturf lawn gnomes who get their opinions from their corporate paymasters. Oh, wait, it’s exactly like that.

Perhaps we could defuse the tension by asking the boycott organizers if they think someone who sat quietly at Klan rallies for twenty years could credibly be accused of racism. I’m sure they would say “no”… and since that’s an accurate analogy for Obama’s decades at Jeremiah Wright’s Church of Racial Hatred, Beck would doubtless be moved to offer a polite apology, and we could call the boycott off. Maybe Beck could give President Obama an autographed copy of his book, with a “Sorry, dude!” inscription. Beck’s thoughtful gift would doubtless secure a place of honor in the White House library, alongside Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Eduardo Galeano, and Fugitive Days: A Memoir by Bill Ayers.

The rest of Beck’s comment, asserting that Obama has “deep-seated hatred for white people of the white culture,” should be easy for the President’s defenders to disprove. All they have to do is cite one positive thing Obama has said or written about white culture. Anywhere. Ever. Hopefully they can get back to us before GMAC needs another taxpayer bailout, to address the self-inflicted financial damage from its participation in the boycott. I wouldn’t recommend wasting any time going through Obama’s university compositions, assuming you can find where they’re buried, and get past the three-headed guard dog. He graduated from Columbia and Harvard, where “deep-seated hatred for white people of the white culture” is written in green on your thesis when the professor hands it back to you, along with “excellent sentence composition!” and “good use of original sources!”

There’s no question that Beck’s comment was provocative and rude. If you happen to be in a room with Glenn Beck at the moment, and you’re reading this to him out loud, he probably just shouted “Exactly!” Political and cultural debates always feature provocation and rude behavior. The American media occasionally becomes very prim about this. Strangely enough, these occasions always coincide with the election of a Democrat President. The same people puckering their lips over the heated tone of Beck’s assertions, Sarah Palin’s “death panel” commentary, or the behavior of town-hall protesters, thought the temperature was just peachy when liberals were openly fantasizing about assassinating President Bush. The average liberal couldn’t order a burger and fries at McDonald’s without informing the cashier that Bush was a subhuman cowboy moron.

Our political discourse is heated because the stakes are so high. Obama has wasted trillions of dollars in taxpayer money, threatened the economy with permanent recession through his cap-and-trade bill, and tried to ram through a federal takeover of health insurance without debate. The Administration openly asserts that certain Americans “shouldn’t do a whole lot of talking,” and labels dissent from its agenda un-patriotic. Today we hear rumors that Democrats plan to shove their health-care debacle down the throats of a public that has become increasingly united in opposition to it, using parliamentary “nuclear options” to muscle it through Congress. The public is right to feel a bit testy when Congress talks about using “nuclear options” against it.

We have arrived at a moment when politics determines the survival of entire industries. Broken companies are dug up from shallow graves at the edges of the free market, and reanimated with massive infusions of tax dollars, for the benefit of the politically-connected union infestations that killed them. People who end up on the wrong side of health-care rationing could pay for their unwise 2008 presidential votes with their lives. There is no place where a taxpayer can go to secure a refund for his share of the squandered $787 billion “stimulus” bill… just as there will be no place to go when they discover socialized medicine is a disaster. There will only be a comment box at the local Post Office / Government Surgical Clinic, where you can scribble your complaint on the back of your organ donor card.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Average people should not require advanced degrees in medicine and economics to make informed decisions in the voting booth. They don’t have time to study the effects of deficit spending on the bond market, or the sad history of attempts to repeal the laws of supply and demand through subsidies and price controls. They have lives to lead, children to raise, and jobs that give them plenty to worry about. They respond to loud, rude, spectacular things, because they desperately want to believe the situation is simple enough for them to comprehend it, and cast informed, meaningful votes. The Left understands this very well, and grits its teeth when the Right starts playing the game. The people who blew billions of tax dollars fooling voters into thinking they could get “free money” to buy a new car, have no right to complain when a smart lady with a Facebook page coins a phrase that galvanizes opposition to their agenda… or when a guy with 2.5 million viewers uses harsh language to bellow a challenge the media should have issued much more politely, during the presidential campaign, for the benefit of their 50 million viewers.

Americans are becoming increasingly uneasy with the degree of politics that has been infused into every aspect of their lives. They’re only just beginning to realize how much worse this President has made the situation, in the seventy years since his election. (That’s what it feels like, anyway.) People trapped on a runaway train can be forgiven for screaming, especially when the conductor has made it plain that he cannot be talked into easing back on the throttle, and thinks anyone who tries it should be thrown off the train. It’s too bad the media gave Obama so many free passes during the campaign. I can forgive the angry look on Glenn Beck’s face as he tears them up.

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