Barbie O'Reilly strikes again

"Don’t make me cut your mic." - Megyn Kelly, the female version of Bill O'Reilly

Click the first link to see Fox News Democrat Kirsten Powers subject herself once again* to shrill rudeness from one of Fox's stable of perpetually angry, outraged and indignant conservafems for daring to disagree with them. Conservafems get very upset when their prop "liberal" doesn't stick to the narrative. Because they are so immersed in their hermetically sealed conservaverse that actual reality doesn't matter.

Lesson to be learned for any prospective Fox News "liberal": don't stand in the way of a Fox News pundit and their favorite pasttime - racebaiting.

*Powers previously received a veiled threat from Michelle Malkin for daring to point out that Ann Coulter calling John Edwards a "faggot" at the 2007 CPAC was not a sudden abberation but part of Coulter's history of such remarks. Malkin angrily warned Powers that she wasn't one that Powers should try to pick a "fight" with.

Update: Strike 2 for Kelly, this time with Fox News liberal Juan Williams.

Update II: Dave Weigel gets it about right.

Recipe for disaster

George Lakoff on disaster messaging

• The Republicans outmessage the Democrats. The Democrats, having no effective response, face disaster: They lose politically, either in electoral support or failure on crucial legislation.
• The Democrats then take polls and do focus groups. The pollsters discover that extremist Republicans control the most common (“mainstream”) way of thinking and talking about the given issue.
• The pollsters recommend that Democrats move to the right: adopt conservative Republican language and a less extreme version of conservative policy, along with weakened versions of some Democratic ideas.
• The Democrats believe that, if they follow this advice, they can gain enough independent and Republican support to pass legislation that, at least, will be some improvement on the extreme Republican position.
• Otherwise, the pollsters warn, Democrats will lose popular support — and elections — to the Republicans, because “mainstream” thought and language resides with the Republicans.
• Believing the pollsters, the Democrats change their policy and their messaging, and move to the right.
• The Republicans demand even more and refuse to support the Democrats

Al Gore has a blog?

It just came to my attention that Al Gore has a blog which appears (from my cursory examination of the site) to focus on human induced global warming. Given that Gore is probably the planet's leading activist when it comes to raising awareness of the climate crisis facing humanity, this is a site worth bookmarking.

Another reason that Gore's blog gets a Daily Doubter thumbs up is that he has written one of the best and most accessible modern defenses of Enlightenment values as applied to current events; and did so addressing many of the same issues that have been covered here.

Glenn Beck cares oh so much about history

The other day, Beck was outraged and indignant that progressives had erased from history footage of Robert Byrd's filibustering of the Civil Rights Act, stating, "We have re-written history, and we are only looking now for the truth that helps our side. It must stop."

First, I'll give you a moment to click the link to see exactly how dumb Beck and apparently his research staff are.

Secondly, notice that Beck is doing exactly what he's accusing "progressives" of doing. While Beck is very, very concerned that people not forget the racist past of Byrd, he doesn't seem so interested in informing his audience about the racist history of many of his own intellectual heroes, a curious omission since Beck keeps recommending their work to his audience. This is, after all, a man who recently gave the commencement speech at Liberty University and received an honorary doctorate - I don't recall hearing Beck talk about how the late Rev. Falwell opposed Brown v. Board of Education on the grounds that it was a satanic plot.

And this is the same Beck who is charging his audience ten dollars a month for the privelige of being brainwashed with Christian nationalist lies. (Did you know that the argument for independence first made in Common Sense, then distilled in the Declaration of Independence, was "nothing more than a listing of all of the sermons that folks had been hearing in church in the decades leading up to the American Revolution"? Right. Because Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson were such huge fans of preachers and churches.*)

And this is the same Beck who found the US House of Foreign Relations committee passing a resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide to be a matter of ridicule and derision, incredulous that anyone would waste their time with concern over something that took place during the World War I era ... so says a man who spends every one of his programs talking about how evil Woodrow Wilson was.

I wish Beck's audience would or could notice this sort of inconsistency. Beck the humanitarian hero, saving history to preserve human liberty, is a narrative that doesn't mix all that well with the reality of the Beck who finds genocide denial - the most sinister form of historical revision possible - a laughing matter.

*"In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. It is easier to acquire wealth and power by this combination than by deserving them, and to effect this, they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer engine for their purposes." - Thomas Jefferson, to Horatio G Spafford, March 17, 1814

A refreshingly good book

I'm only about a third of a way through with Steven Poole's Unspeak, but I am going to go ahead and recommend reading it. With concise, razor like intellectual clarity, Poole goes about analyzing some of the most common and prevalent "unspeak" - language that is designed to smuggle in a viewpoint without having to argue it - of our times.

Given current events, with BP and the federal government working to censor journalists from covering the disastrous results of their incestuous collusion; and despite BP having recently catastrophically damaged the Gulf Coast ecology, a continuance of BP's history of safety negligence, just having received an EPA waiver to dump more pollution into Lake Michigan, I'll quote this excerpt from the book:

The idea that everything is now subordinate to what ‘capital’ wants to ‘see’ is not merely an idée fixe of paranoid anti-globalisation protesters, but stated clearly in public by those who minister officially to capital’s desires. Back in the US, George W. Bush declared: ‘We need to reform our legal systems so the people, on the one hand, can get justice; on the other hand, the justice system doesn’t affect the flows of capital.’ First a hasty sop to liberals – acknowledging that, sure, people should still be able to ‘get’ justice, just as they pop down to the store to get a can of soda – and then the remarkable notion that justice, on the other hand, should never interfere with the operations of money. So justice is a subeconomy within the larger one (you can ‘get’ justice), but it has no right to interfere with overarching systems of profit. Justice is subordinate to and dependent on capitalism

Don't let ignorance stop you

Media Matters notes Michael Savage denigrating fire fighters, saying that because of unions we have too many firehouses, and need to consolidate them into single units that respond to large areas.

Anyone who knows anything about firefighting will find this laughable: the whole point of more units covering smaller areas is quicker response time, which is vital to mitigating a situation safely.

The rest of his rant is just juvenile. Yes, firefighters relax during their downtime at the station (when they're not busy training or going out in the community and providing public education/fire prevention services) - and they do workout while on shift - so that they are mentally and physically prepared to respond to a potentially life threatening situation at a moment's notice.

Unlike Savage, who sits on his ass for hours a day running his mouth about things he knows nothing about, firefighters may go from sitting around doing nothing to being fully geared out, breathing air and putting water on fire inside a burning structure in under five minutes.

Quote of the day

"Ideas don't have rights. People do." - Tom Flynn

Updates for the New American Newspeak Dictionary

Today's updates for the New American Newspeak Dictionary are:

Public diplomacy: propaganda
Politically correct: used to describe terms that are in fact, not politically corrrect, while using a politically correct euphemism
Misleading: not misleading; pointing out that the person making the charge is obfuscating, which is to say, misleading
Tendentious: not tendentious, pointing out that the person making the charge is being tendentious; the cry of the relativist, indignant at reality being described as reality

See Unspeak for discussion of "public diplomacy." It should be noted that Poole makes a distinction between newspeak and unspeak, where as I'm using "newspeak" in a more generic manner to create an umbrella category for the political misuse of language (which may itself constitute a bit of unspeak.)

For the other three, see this post by Glenn Greenwald, and marvel at Bill Keller's audacity to assert that those who call waterboarding torture are being "misleading", "tendentious", and "politically correct."

Quote of the day

"[I]t is a common topic to dwell on the wickedness of that man who endeavors to wrest to his own purposes not only the effect of things, but also the meaning of words, in order both to do as he pleases, and to call what he does by whatever name he likes." - Cicero

Via Unspeak by Steven Poole

A blogger returns with a bang

I just noticed that the always thoughtful blogger The Anonymous Liberal is now back from blogging hiatus. His first post back, explaining the frustration that led him to spend some time away from his keyboard, is a must read. I can say I share his frustration at the alternate universe being fabricated by the conservative movement; this same frustration animates much of my blogging.

[T]he Right has constructed its own Bubble World, a sort of political Truman Show complete with its own facts and rules (albeit facts and rules that are constantly changing based on political expediency). The writers, directors, and actors in this conservative version of Seahaven are the legions of GOP politicians, operatives, and conservative media outlets that relentlessly push this politically expedient alternative reality, and the Trumans are the millions of regular Americans who don't realize the joke is on them.

...

In Bubble World, there is a movement known as the Tea Party, whose members are simultaneously incensed about the size of the deficit and the fact that they have to pay taxes (even though they have the lowest tax rates in the free world and just got significant tax cuts--from Obama--in the past year). Moreover, they're not angry at the party that built the deficit--by starting wars and giving massive tax cuts to people who are much richer than them--or that presided, just recently, over the near collapse of the economy. But they are furious at the party that just recently took the reins, inheriting both a crumbling economy and massive deficit. And if they had their way, they would put back in power a party whose only policy idea is, that's right, cutting taxes; which, of course, would only make the deficit much worse.

...

Freed from the burden of any actual governing responsibility, the GOP has been free to devote all of its efforts to reconstructing their Bubble World. And they've been largely successful. An entire movement has formed that is based, almost entirely, on confusion and mis-directed anger, a movement that sees the world only through the lens of Fox News and other right wing outlets. The Tea Party is an army of Trumans, a movement of people who have whole-heartedly embraced the false reality with which they've been presented.

Lara Logan reviews Almost Famous

Logan: How dare William Miller betray the trust of Stillwater and publish embarassing information about the band? Miller has never entertained music fans the way Stillwater has. How does he expect to get access again?

Resources necessary to understand this post:
Wikipedia entry Almost Famous
"The two poles of journalism"
"'They will let you back': The shame of Lara Logan"

The backlash's curious choice of target of ire

The artist formely known as Blackwater has been awarded contracts worth a couple hundred million despite employees being prosecuted for the killing of Iraqi civilians. Meanwhile, the GAO has found no misuse of funds by ACORN, who got defunded by Congress after the organization was accused of fictional, fabricated crimes by a movement conservative criminal.

Oh how outraged and indignant our brave members of Congress get at false reports of corruption involving an organization that helps poor people and minorities, yet they somehow don't seem to find the same cause for concern when wealthy corporations commit actual crimes and corruption.

How sickening is it that Democrats in Congress roll over on ACORN to appease the conservative voices who now come to the defense of BP's destructive actions in the Gulf Coast

So, here’s how it works. They crucify a nonprofit that helps poor people without any credible evidence, in fact as it turns out entirely manufactured evidence, and they do so without a blink of an eye or an apology. But when it comes to a corporation whose negligence has so far killed two dozen and injured hundreds, and entirely destroyed the Gulf of Mexico, they apologize to the company?

Killing is killing?

From Worse than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity by Daniel J. Goldhagen

[W]hat if the Americans had conquered a few Japanese cities, stopped their advance, and proceeded to shoot 140,000 Japanese civilians, men, women, and children (the number who died immediately or from injuries in the next few months from the atomic bombing off Hiroshima), explaining to Japan's leaders and its public that only surrender would prevent more mass slaughters? Would Truman's apologists have similarly justified this more conventional mass murdering as militarily and morally necessary? What if three days later Truman ordered American soldiers to shoot another seventy thousand Japanese men, women, and children from a second city? Would we not call such slaughters mass murder?

Indeed, wouldn't we?

But why don't we process the dropping of atomic bombs on civilian populations that same way?

Goldhagen himself suggests a combination of nationalistic tendency to see one's country in the best light possible and a failure to draw distinction between the defining of an act and giving explanation and moral judgement of it. In other words, we know that Truman's intentions were not as murderous as Hitler's, therefore categorizing Truman's actions as mass murder doesn't feel right.

Going further in this direction, I would suspect that our mind's bias in the processing of ethicial dilemmas also plays a significant part.

Consider, for example, this thought experiment concocted by the philosophers Judith Jarvis Thompson and Philippa Foot: Imagine you’re at the wheel of a trolley and the brakes have failed. You’re approaching a fork in the track at top speed. On the left side, five rail workers are fixing the track. On the right side, there is a single worker. If you do nothing, the trolley will bear left and kill the five workers. The only way to save five lives is to take the responsibility for changing the trolley’s path by hitting a switch. Then you will kill one worker. What would you do?

Now imagine that you are watching the runaway trolley from a footbridge. This time there is no fork in the track. Instead, five workers are on it, facing certain death. But you happen to be standing next to a big man. If you sneak up on him and push him off the footbridge, he will fall to his death. Because he is so big, he will stop the trolley. Do you willfully kill one man, or do you allow five people to die?

Logically, the questions have similar answers. Yet if you poll your friends, you’ll probably find that many more are willing to throw a switch than push someone off a bridge.

Marc Hauser discussed the whys and hows of such thought experiments at length in Moral Minds, but the gist of the answer of why actions that have the same consequences are viewed differently is because we are implicitly prejudiced against direct, physical intentional killing rather than indirect passive killing as a secondary consequence.

So when we think about soldiers going door to door, executing individual civilians we are naturally inclined to aversion, where as when we hear about a pilot flying over a city, pulling a lever allowing a bomb to fall out, and then flying off our minds are not quite equipped to feel the same inherent revulsion at this more indirect and passive form of killing; it is, for our "moral minds", an abstraction that doesn't register all that well.

And the abstraction becomes even easier to maintain when the consequence of the passive action is censored.

I would also suggest that this kind of dynamic is at work in the minds of those who somehow find Israel's actions regarding the civilian population of Gaza - e.g. killing Palestinian civilians at a rate several hundred times greater than Hamas killing of Israeli civilians - defensible.

Today's discount book purchase

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (hc) by Rick Pearlstein for six dollars.

Quote of the day

"Supposing is good, but finding out is better." - Mark Twain, Autobiography

h/t Skepticblog

Beck "jokes" about Obama being Satanic agent

Once again I'm dumbstruck by the level of insanity that Fox News is willing to broadcast in the interest of torpedoing a Democratic administration.



Watching that clip, and recalling Beck having previously entertained the notion that President Obama might be the antiChrist, I was left with the impression that Beck is suggesting that Obama is attracting flies, bees, and rodents because he is an agent of Satan.

That is precisely what he means (although he delivers his dog whistle for antiChrist fearing, New World Order conspiracists in the form of levity.) This site notes that Beck read to his radio audience "most of" this post:

Obama, the Lord of the Flies.

Did you know that ”Lord of the Flies” is the literal meaning of the Greek word (βεελζεβούβ) for Beelzebub?

So who is Beelzebub? Beelzebub — derived from Ba‘al Zebûb, a Semitic deity worshipped in the Philistine city of Ekron – is the name of one of the seven princes of Hell. Beelzebub was used by the later Christians as a term for Satan.

Another day, another martyr complex fantasy

Glenn Beck now believes that George Soros wants to have him killed; and the executives and staff at Fox "News" continue to look the other way while Beck spins further and further into the paranoid, delusional funhouse mirrorverse that only exists within his own mind.

If you like the Kindle, you may love the iPad (or not)

With the belief (hope, actually) that Apple's new cutting edge tablet device - the iPad - would help me return to a more regular blogging pattern, I preordered a 3G model and have had one since the product's release date. Although I love the device, it hasn't worked out so far as a blogging tool, as it doesn't seem to work so well with Blogger, which is why you see the posts with no red links ... the operating system doesn't seem compatible with the Compose post function of blogger, which means you're forced into using the more limited Edit Html option. Plus, any Flash video will not play, so that knocks out the ability to watch lots of clips that are an obligatory part of blogging (such as those at the Daily Show and the Colbert Report.)

But those issues aside, the device is awesome. The screen displays ... well, whatever ... gorgeously. Web browsing and media interfacing (with other devices and through iTunes) is a breeze. Tons of useful, fun, interesting apps. Etc. It's a great mobile media device.

I don't want to get to much into a review of the device in general, but to address it specifically as an electronic book reader. You may recall that I previously expressed my appreciation of Amazon's Kindle. Well, the iBooks program for iPad blows Kindle out of the water in terms of appearance and general coolness. iBooks doesn't just provide you with a convenient e-text - it provides you with a virtual book and virtual bookshelf that looks very, very real. When you read a book with the iPad held horizonatally the pages are displayed just like an open book. And when you flip a page you virtually turn the page just as you would with an actual book. And unlike the Kindle, the iPad is backlit ... I've held the iPad at night, reading a book in bed with the lights out really does give you the impression of reading some futuristic, Star Trek type version of a book. And, of course, the iPad displays color so that you get the full effect of any color images that a book might have.

Plus, the iPad runs the Kindle program; but better than the Kindle! You can sync up any books from your Kindle and you will see them displayed in a more eye pleasing fashion with more options for manipulating the text than on the Kindle. It also runs the Barnes and Noble e-reader program.

Now here is the "or not" part. Despite how great - superior, actually - the iPad is in terms of aesthetics, I still prefer reading with my Kindle. The Kindle is smaller and lighter, and is thus more portable and easier to hold during extended reading. Plus, since it's a device dedicated to reading, it is easier to concentrate on actually reading the text. When I'm using the iPad I'll be tempted/distracted into checking e-mail, surfing the net, or playing with all the cool apps that are only a fingertip touch away.

P.S. Forgot to mention, the Kindle can be viewed outdoors, so another plus for it.

Glenn Beck fulfilling MLK's dream...

... if MLK's dream was for the nation's first black President to be constantly race baited by a racist lunatic.

I can't begin to express how sickening (literally) I find Beck's utterly shameless and repeated attempts to co-opt Dr. King's memory to serve his agenda - an agenda that appeals to the sort of racism and prejudice that MLK gave his life to put a stop to.

Is there anyone left at Fox News that has any sense of decency? At all? This is the same Glenn Beck who has been telling his audience how awesome and great Cleon Skousen is, that Skousen is the backbone of the 9/12 movement. That would be this Cleon Skousen:

The tendency was to sell families as units, if for no other reason [than] to keep the slaves contented. The gangs in transit were usually a cheerful lot, though the presence of a number of the more vicious type sometimes made it necessary for them all to go in chains. At the other extreme, when the Central of Georgia railroad company in 1858 equipped a Negro sleeping car to assist in the slave trade it set a standard not always maintained in a later generation. When on the block, the slave was as likely to hinder as to help in his sale. Some, out of a vain conceit in bringing a high price, would boast of their physical prowess, in which case an unwary purchaser would likely be cheated. Others would malinger, because of a grudge against owners or traders or in order to bring a low price and be put at less tiring labor. Dealers, also, adopted the tricks of horse traders to make their merchants more attractive -- the greasiest Negro was generally considered the healthiest.

Yep, I'm sure this is exactly the sort of fair and balanced history that MLK dreamed of one day being taught in schools.

Why I hate the Democratic party, in microcosm

After reading this, I must now go find a wall to bash my head against. See here for more, if you can stomach it.

Quote of the day

"The President has no power, as Commander in Chief, over any civilian. Yet so common is the assumption that he does that when I wrote an op-ed in the New York Times saying that the President is not my Commander in Chief, I received abusive mail saying I was clearly not a citizen of the United States and I should leave the country. Loyalty to the Commander in Chief is now equated with loyalty to the country, though it is clearly a form of disloyalty to the Constitution." - Garry Wills, Bomb Power

Another example of promised change deferred

From "The Spill, the Scandal, and the President"

Like the attacks by Al Qaeda, the disaster in the Gulf was preceded by ample warnings -- yet the administration had ignored them. Instead of cracking down on MMS, as he had vowed to do even before taking office, Obama left in place many of the top officials who oversaw the agency's culture of corruption. He permitted it to rubber-stamp dangerous drilling operations by BP -- a firm with the worst safety record of any oil company -- with virtually no environmental safeguards, using industry-friendly regulations drafted during the Bush years. He calibrated his response to the Gulf spill based on flawed and misleading estimates from BP -- and then deployed his top aides to lowball the flow rate at a laughable 5,000 barrels a day, long after the best science made clear this catastrophe would eclipse the Exxon Valdez.

Dropping an atomic bomb

I've recently begun reading Garry Wills' latest provactive work of history Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State, in which Wills argues that much, if not most, of the centralization of government power in the hands of the Executive branch and subsequent extra-Constitutional governance can be traced and attributed to the development and possession of the atomic bomb.

The gist of the book's thesis (at least so far as I understand from as much as I've read) is conveyed pretty well in this article in which Wills attempts to explain why President Obama has been so quick to adopt the imperial powers the Bush administration had itself excersised.

A president is greatly pressured to keep all the empire’s secrets. He feels he must avoid embarrassing the hordes of agents, military personnel, and diplomatic instruments whose loyalty he must command. Keeping up morale in this vast, shady enterprise is something impressed on him by all manner of commitments. He becomes the prisoner of his own power. As President Truman could not not use the bomb, a modern president cannot not use the huge powers at his disposal. It has all been given him as the legacy of Bomb Power, the thing that makes him not only Commander in Chief but Leader of the Free World. He is a self-entangling giant.

In the book, after noting the finding of the Summary Report of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946 that:

It seems clear that, even without the atomic bombing attacks, air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.

Wills goes on to observe

Whether an invasion of Japan occurred or not, the mere possibility of its happening without use of the Bomb was a nightmare prospect to Groves and other officials. If it became known that the United States had a knockout weapon it did not use, the families of any Americans killed after the development of the Bomb would be furious. The public, the press, and Congress would turn on the President and his advisers. There would have been a cry to impeach President Truman and court-martial General Groves. The administration would be convicted of spending billions of dollars and draining massive amounts of brainpower and manpower from other war projects, and all for nothing. This was the truly terrifying prospect that made use of the Bomb an easy, if not inevitable, choice for those who had harbored their secret project so long and wanted to reveal it with a supreme vindication. Groves even suggested that Truman would be betraying the memory of President Roosevelt, who authorized the Bomb's development, if he rejected its use. The Bomb's tenders had put themselves in a position where they could not not use it. They were now the prisoners of their own creation.

Reading this - and from previously having heard Wills discuss the book in various venues - I can't help but think of the narrator in the George Orwell essay "Shooting an Elephant."

Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if its owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

Of course, in Orwell's essay, the self-oppression of colonialism results in the narrator killing an elephant. In the case of the atomic bomb, it resulted in the killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians.

For more on the book, see Wills at Fora.tv

So, so very true

I agree with Neiwert 150 percent on this one:

The hardest part about trying to follow the increasingly eliminationist -- and dangerous -- wingnuttery of Glenn Beck, beyond the unpleasant work of actually having to watch the entirety of his Fox News shows (so you don't have to), is trying to figure out new ways of saying that he's nuts.

For instance, in an episode earlier this week, Beck asserted that Rosie O'Donnell and Bill Maher are part of a group of black flag anarchists who are going to try to kill Obama, Biden, and Pelosi if they do not do what the "revolutionaries" want done.

How the hell anyone can take this kind of crazy seriously is well beyond my capacity to comprehend.

Quote of the day

'Facts and opinions, once they are used “scientifically” to support the irrational, become interchangeable. Reality is no longer based on the gathering of facts and evidence. It is based on ideology. Facts are altered. Lies become true. Hannah Arendt called it “nihilistic relativism,” although a better phrase might be collective insanity.' - Chris Hedges

Hating Jews Progressives

One of the primary objects of my blogging over the last several years has been my belief that much of what passes for acceptable, mainstream conservative discourse is common hate speech masquerading as legitimate political dispute. In essence, that extremist ideas based in prejudice and bigotry have new found life in a more pc form.

And this is why I use the strike function so often where I replace "Jew" with "liberal," "S-P," or "progressive." It's because it's one of the only ways I know to emphasize something that seems so intuitive to me: often when I hear movement conservative derogatory speech about "liberals" it sounds to me the same way racists that I grew up around in the South talked about blacks.

Now don't get me wrong, I've heard people discussing Republicans and/or conservatives with the same underlying prejudice, contempt and hatred, but there is a key and vital difference. There is no mechanism by which hating conservatives, saying incoherently stupid yet horribly defamatory and demonizing things about them catapults one into media stardom and or wealth.

Which is why I'd like to take a moment, that is to say, a post, to thank Glenn Beck for providing the clearest example to date of the very phenomenon that I've been trying to explain and understand over the course of five years of blogging. Take it away Media Matters

Earlier today, Glenn Beck was regaling his radio audience with stories of all the old books he'd received from listeners and offered some particularly effusive praise for one particular volume that he was reading called The Red Network: A 'Who's Who' and Handbook of Radicalism for Patriots, first published in 1934. According to Beck, the book shows that "McCarthy was absolutely right," and he lauded it for exposing the unions as havens for communists.

Unmentioned by Beck was the name of the author of The Red Network, Elizabeth Dilling, a woman known to history primarily for two things: her trial for sedition during World War II, and her rabid anti-Semitism.

Among Dilling's more noteworthy works was a polemic entitled The Jewish Religion: Its Influence Today (originally titled "The Plot Against Christianity"). As the Anti-Defamation League notes, Dilling wrote in The Jewish Religion that Jews consider non-Jews to be sub-human, and that Jews have a hatred for Christians that is expressed in code in the Talmud. More the point, Dilling specifically blamed Jews for communism, writing: "Marxism, Socialism, or Communism in practice are nothing but state-capitalism and rule by a privileged minority, exercising despotic and total control over a majority having virtually no property or legal rights. As is discussed elsewhere herein, Talmudic Judaism is the progenitor of modem Communism and Marxist collectivism as it is now applied to a billion or more of the world's population. ... Socialism is indeed merely the clover held in front of the cow's nose to get her into the barn under the milking machine. It is a mechanism whereby a 'human' can lead a whole non-human herd into the Jewish controlled barn."

And

As Media Matters' Simon Maloy noted, Beck had kind words for Dilling's 1934 anti-communist book, The Red Network, saying: "This is a book -- and I'm a getting a ton of these -- from people who were doing what we're doing now. We now are documenting who all of these people are. Well, there were Americans in the first 50 years of this nation that took this seriously, and they documented it." Maloy noted that Dilling has a long history of rabid anti-Semitism, such as calling President Eisenhower "Ike the Kike" and labeling President Kennedy's New Frontier program the "Jew frontier."

Professor Glen Jeansonne and writer David Luhrssen note in the encyclopedia Women and War that Dilling wasn't only anti-Semitic, but a sympathizer and supporter of the Nazis and Hitler

This link, particularly, is significant

According to [University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee history professor]Jeansonne, Dilling was probably the "most bigoted woman anti-Semite of the period around World War II" and used "long-discredited conspiracy theories" -- including theories advanced in the infamous Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion -- in an effort to link Communism and Judaism.

Jeansonne said that "in addition to being anti-Semitic and anti-Communist, Dilling purported the most convoluted conspiracy theories that are imaginable." He added, "She viewed all sorts of groups with no connection or only the loosest connection as being bound together in an international conspiracy."

I say this is significant because if you've been following my posts on Beck you'll recall that I've said repeatedly that Beck's world view is basically a Protocols of Zion type paranoid conspiracy, but with "progressives" having replaced "Jews."

Here we see Beck mindlessly endorsing precisely that sort of conspiracy and hate, apparently believing that Dilling was exposing the same "progressive" enemies within that he's Quixotically battling. One might be inclined to excuse Beck on the grounds that he didn't realize that Dilling was part of the very cabal of pro-Nazi sympathists that Beck has characterized on his tv and radio programs as being part of the 100 year "progressive" plot to destroy America, and given his demonstrated ignorance and stupidity this is quite plausible, but yet presumably Beck has read the book he's endorsing, which doesn't explain his inability to recognize hate when he sees it.

Here’s the book Glenn Beck is pushing: The Red network: a ‘who’s who’ and handbook of radicalism for patriots. LGF reader Killgore Trout points out a lovely quote from this toxic book:

…the American Negroes have acquired professions, property, banks, homes and produced a rising class of refined, home loving people. This is far more remarkable than that many negroes are still backwards. The Red play upon the Negroes’ love of their own people and represent them as persecuted in order to inflame them against the very White people who have in reality given the colored race far greater opportunities than their fellow negroes would have given them in Africa today.

Of course, as Alexander Zaitchik notes in Common Nonsense, Beck has a history of introducing his audience to right wing extremist bigots without bothering to identify their prejudice to his audience (more on this in an upcoming post.)

As Dave Neiwert puts it, "[this is] probably the most significant major-media endorsement of American fascist ideology since the 1930s." One point I disagree with Mr. Neiwert on is his use of the qualifier "probably" in suspecting that Beck believed that American Nazis were progressives at heart. I disagree with it because I watched the episode of Mr. Beck's program where he told his audience indeed that American fascism was one of the consequences of "progressivism" derailing the American tradition followed by a psuedo-documentary arguing the same.

What would Glenn Beck have to do, short of putting on Klan robes and declaring President Obama a threat to white power, to end his career in the mainstream media?

Quote of the day

"[The] Constitution ... is a thoroughly secular document that its authors found imperfect enough to begin amending as soon as they finished writing it. Bereft of references to Mosaic law, Jesus Christ, or God, its own language constitutes an unanswerable rebuke to religious hucksters, past and present, who seek to deny our shared Enlightenment heritage in the name of the voices inside their heads." - Alexander Zaitchik, Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance

On ideas

"Ideas are the cogs that drive history onward, for good and ill; understanding influential beliefs, world views, scientific ideas and philosophical theories is a part of the equipment needed by engaged citizens of the world to make better sense of it." - A.C. Grayling, Ideas that Matter: The Concepts that Shape the 21st Century

Quote of the day

"Previously, grown men who traded in emotional caprice and apocalyptic harangues had been relegated to street corners and local public access programming. But Beck [is] plying this routine on international cable." - Alexander Zaitchik, Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance

Imperial presidency still in effect

While I've been busy focusing on the daily erupting volcanoe of conspiratorial crazy that is Glenn Beck, Glenn Greenwald has lately written a series of important posts documenting and commenting upon the ongoing human rights abuses by the Obama administration, as well as about its hypocrisy in prosecuting whistleblowers despite campaign promises of transparency in government and the vapid mantra of Looking Forward, Not Backward which only seems to apply to people involved in torturing people to death, unleashing devastating illegal war or massive illegal surveillance, not to people who expose government wrongdoing.

I really can't add anthing to what Greenwald has written, but I can tie it into why I find Beck's prominent role within conservative politics to be so distressing (and infuriating): above you have Greenwald - who has consistently written against the abuse of civil liberties in the name of waging war on "terror" - giving actual, real world examples of the imperial presidency being abused. Meanwhile, Glenn Beck is busy telling his audience that it should be preparing itself for an apocalyptic battle with a fictional foe (the Satanic, Marxist Manchurian Obama administration that is a figment of Beck's imagination) that is going to take away their liberties. And that would be the same Glenn Beck who helped propagandize the populace in favor of giving the imperial presidency powers to abuse civil liberties in the name of fighting "the war on terror."

Latest discount book buy

Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, and Guerrilla War, from the American Revolution to Iraq (hc) by William Polk for 2 dollars.

For more on the book, see (or hear) this discussion between Polk and Melissa Block on All Things Considered.

"Historian"

A must read article by actual historian Joeseph Palermo

Beck has emerged as the most influential promoter of the Jonah Goldberg/Amity Shlaes contention that President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal were unmitigated "calamities" for the country. Almost nightly, Beck tells his several million viewers that FDR, Woodrow Wilson, and other "progressives" (even TR) were engaged in a long-term project to strip Americans of their freedom and impose some kind of totalitarian state. Historians whose specialty is the early 20th Century probably could never have dreamt that a TV and radio personality could convince so many ordinary Americans that laws that ensure the safety of meat and drugs, minimum wages, expanding voting rights, etc. undermined their "freedom."

Beck, Goldberg, Shlaes and others seem to be pursuing a long-term project of their own to misinform their rather gullible audiences into believing that anytime a government imposes limits on the ability of private business (especially giant corporations) to exploit the country's land and labor it is an attack on individual "liberty." It's the identical argument that the representatives of corporate trusts deployed at the turn of the last century when they demanded the "freedom" to do anything they wished. In the wake of the Wall Street financial meltdown and the Gulf of Mexico oil spill catastrophe, both brought to us by the less than benevolent actions of unrestrained corporate power, Beck's views are not only stupid and false, but dangerous.

My bookstore nightmare

I walked into a major chain book retailer today to be confronted in the Politics section by 61 - yes, I counted them - sixtyfriggin'one! copies of Sean Hannity's Conservative Victory: Defeating Obama's Radical Agenda and 45 copies of books by Glenn Beck, mostly consisting of Arguing with Idiots and Common Sense.

Irony being that the prospective buyers of those books are likely convinced - thanks, in no small part, to the authors themselves - that they are the victims of oppressive liberal media bias.

Update: It's actually worse than I thought. Revisiting the store, I see that I failed to notice two large, prominent display stacks of Conservative Victory strategically located. I didn't have the heart to count 'em, but by eyeball estimate, there appears to be close to two hundred copies all together on the floor.

More discount book buys

Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein (pb) by Scott Ritter for 1 dollar.

Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul (hc) by Kenneth Miller for 3 dollars.

Latest discount book buy

Unspeak: How Words Become Weapons, How Weapons Become a Message, and How That Message Becomes Reality (hc) by Steven Poole for five dollars.

The author also writes a blog of the same title. Here's a somewhat recent entry from the blog, responding to John Bolton describing President Obama as "Post-American.

There is a difference, of course, between arguing that Obama’s policies are somehow post-American-exceptionalism, and saying that Obama himself is post-American. The insinuation blatantly is that he is not really American, a notion that will doubtless give succour to “birthers”, racists, and other nidiots. Indeed, one might even suspect that the phrase is designed to do just that, to act as a little slow-fused bomb of hatred and contempt secreted within an ostensibly rational discussion of foreign policy in a broadsheet newspaper. I don’t recall any Republican wingnuts arguing that, say, Bill Clinton or Al Gore were not actually American; presumably there is something about Obama other than the colour of his skin that renders the accusation more relevant in his case, though I cannot right now think what it might be.

Beck to reveal his own "New world order" conspiracy

So how long before Beck publishes something about the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Progressivism?

In the same episode, he dismissed Media Matters' criticism of his promotion of Christian nationalist pseudohistory on the grounds that the site is funded (it isn't) by Jewish Progressive international financier George Soros.

Quote of the day

"No tyranny is more cruel than that which is practiced in the shadow of the law and with the trappings of justice: that is, one would drown the unfortunate by the very plank by which he would hope to be saved." - Montesquieu

h/t Scott Horton

The American Founding Fathers were influenced by the lessons they drew from a study of antiquity and particularly helped in this process by Montesquieu and his essay of the rise and collapse of liberty in Rome. In Montesquieu’s study of Tiberius, he reflects how the institutions of government were steadily corrupted by those who sought the favor of the emperor. Judges convicted and sentenced anyone of whom Tiberius grew suspicious; senators vied with one another in denouncing their rivals to him. This reflects the weakness of human nature in the face of power, but Montesquieu focuses on how it causes the disintegration of the justice system. There is something particularly pernicious about a situation in which the outer trappings of justice exist, but the substance has been replaced with a craven homage to the power of the executive.

A bargain buy for the Kindle

Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda by Noam Chomsky for $2.31

Excerpts of the book can be read here.

Those who have had their political understandings informed by Glenn Beck will be surprised to see that leftist intellectual icon Chomsky is a fierce critic of the propaganda efforts and civil liberties abuses of the Wilson administration. Although Chomsky, unlike Beck, does not fail to mention that Wilson was suppressing the liberties of "the left" with the approval of the business community.

Quote of the day

"Just out of curiosity — exactly how much of a wuss does your God have to be, do you think, if he can’t take being picked on by a Swedish cartoonist?" - Matt Taibbi

Irony: sounding like a Nazi while comparing someone to Nazis

"The Left has thoroughly infiltrated nearly every cultural commanding height of our civilization. That is, they hold power, influence and control of academia, the elite news media, Hollywood, union leaders, trial lawyers, the courts, the Congress, and the bureaucracy at all levels of government. They are radically redefining our very culture by deciding what is news, what is entertainment, what our children learn in school, and what kind of government we should have." - Newt Gingrich

Switch "the Jew" for "the Left" and you'd have rhetoric that would fit right in with the rest of the hate at the white nationalist web forum Stormfront.

Beck now finds the Christian Coalition too Marxist for his tastes

Obviously, the Christian Coalition's support for Marxism is reflective of the ultra-leftwing radical socialism of the organization's commie founder Pat Robertson. (As Beck would say, isn't it interesting how the Marxism remark seems to have been scrubbed from the segment's transcript.)

Or, as Inigo Montoya might say if confronted with Beck and his repetition of the term "Marxist": "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Most murder victims aren't attractive white females?

I've mentioned before my disgust with the way that our national tv news media exploit the deaths of attractive, young white females by elevating those stories for obsessive coverage. I consider such behavior vulture like: the networks feed off of the corpses of the women. The purpose of such stories is not to serve any of the civic purposes of journalism, but to increase ratings with sensationalistic stories that require no actual journalistic work.

And while they are busy doing hard hitting stories about such issues of national importance as the death of the father of a murder suspect (are you f'ing kidding me, Nancy Grace?), the real story of homicides in America is lost

Now a senior reporter at the L.A. Times, Jill Leovy started The Homicide Report in 2007 after noticing the huge disparity in the way murders were covered by the news media. The sensational stories, mostly the outliers and anomalies, got the most attention. But the majority of homicides were largely ignored.

"The first year I was in the Watts homicide unit, that unit had 60 murders that year," she tells NPR's Guy Raz. "I was shadowing the detectives, and we were running on murders every other day. Every morning they had CNN on, or something on, and it would have the latest installment of the Laci Peterson murder." The sensational case of a pregnant wife murdered by her husband enthralled the nation for months.

"The detectives in that unit were fascinated with it. Every day, we would have a moment of discussing the newest development in that case, and then they'd go on to do the 60 other murders that year — and that is homicide in America.

"The truth about homicide," she says, "is that it is black men in their 20s, in their 30s, in their 40s. The way we guide money and policy in this country, we do not care about those people. It's not described as what's central to our homicide problem, and I wanted people to see that. I wanted people to see those lives and to see that that's our real homicide problem in America.

"The money needs to go to black male argument violence," she continues. "Anything else … you're dealing with the margins of the problem, statistically, and it's not right."

On Sylvia Browne's track record

From Skeptical Inquirer

According to Browne, “my accuracy rate is somewhere between 87 and 90 percent, if I’m recalling correctly.” This article disputes that statistic by examining the criminal cases for which Browne has performed readings. The research demonstrates that in 115 cases (all of the available readings), Browne’s confirmable accuracy was 0 percent.

On faux Nazi comparison outrage

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Back in Black - Glenn Beck's Nazi Tourette's
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Quote of the day

"I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." - Isaac Newton

Latest discount buys (and other bargains)

Lord Jim (pb) by Joseph Conrad for $0.50
Nostromo (pb) by Joseph Condrad for $0.50

For the Kindle:
The Necessity of Atheism by Percy Bysshe Shelley for $1.84
The Last Man by Mary Shelley for free (fancier editions are also available for increasing prices)
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects by Mary Wollstonecraft for $0.95
The Complete Wizard of Oz Collection by L. Frank Baum for $0.95
The Worm Ouroboros by E.R. Eddison for $1.05

The Worm Ouroboros is a somewhat obscure (and forgotten) 1922 fantasy novel that helped define the genre and served as an inspiration for authors like J.R.R. Tolkien.

Why Glenn Beck sounds like an anti-Semite (but isn't)

In response to a post by Arthur Goldwag noting how structurally and rhetorically similiar Glenn Beck's conspiracy theories are to classic anti-Semitism, I commented

“I don’t know if Glenn Beck is an anti-Semite or not”

I don’t think he is; he just thinks about “progressives” the way anti-Semites think about “Jews” and the lineage of ideas he has been influenced by come from a tradition of anti-Semitic conspiracism. It’s kind of like a vestigial anti-Semitism: it’s not his intent, but just kind of a vestige of the ideology he has absorbed and co-opted.
Take for instance who he was targeting last week: Louis Brandeis for being in the Wilson administration and dying “wealthy.” Perfect, Beck has once again managed to target someone who anti-Semites demonize. Beck didn’t do it for anti-Semitic reasons, but for anti-progressive reasons.

Chip Berlet also noted that Beck's attack on Brandeis sounded like anti-Semitism.

As Media Matters for America observed, apparently the most significant aspect of the story for Beck was that the university was named after the late Jewish scholar and Supreme Court justice, Louis D. Brandeis. For Beck, wrote a Media Matters researcher, the "Brandeis University symposium on political extremism is suspect because Louis Brandeis was in [Woodrow] Wilson's cabinet;" the quip accompanies a link to that portion of Beck's tirade which skirted on the thin ice of classic antisemitic conspiracy claims about manipulation of politics by powerful elite Jews.

But the thing is that Brandeis being Jewish likely never entered his mind. What did enter his mind was that he was a "progressive."

Like I've been saying: Beck thinks about "progressives" the way anti-Semites think about "Jews". Both equate the preferred scapegoat with controlling the media, being Bolsheviks, an enemy of Christianity, and an internal threat to the nation.

A new Fox News niche

Familiar with the Fox News "Democrat", I hadn't realized that Fox also has a resident Fox News "atheist" who has a similar function: to act as if reasonable atheists agree with fundamentalist Christian nationalists that liberals worship evolution as a religion and in fact promote evolution as part of a conspiracy to destroy Christianity.

That resident would the previously mentioned SE Cupp, someone who I generally ignored since she's the usual attractive Fox conservative lacking any obvious intellectual merit who casually tosses off extremist sounding remarks; she came on my radar with her new hate-mongering book demonizing both atheists and "liberals."

Here's an example of some of the rhetoric from her new book:

- The debate over the legitimacy of evolution isn't really about a battle between fact and fiction. It's about Christianity, and the liberal media's attempt to eradicate it from all corners of society.

- This revolution [led by the Obama administration], already in full throttle around the country is being waged against you and me and every other American, and its goal is simple: to overthrow God, and silence Christian America for good.”

I once again marvel at the normalization of extremism in American politics. The Daily Howler sums up Cupp's credentials

Who the heck is S. E. Cupp? She’s a young, extremely fresh-faced star pundit on Fox, so positioned because a pair of glasses have let her attain the catchable sexy librarian look. Can we talk? Among its various approaches, Fox News spills over with hot young women who are dragged out each night to offer analysis. Some of these women are perfectly bright; in some cases, this ain’t required. Beyond that, Cupp comes from a particular stall in the growing Fox stable of pundits—she plays a slightly off-center conservative, letting Fox present the world with the illusion of diversity. (A string of well-known “Fox Democrats” helps Fox complete this deception.) Most specifically, Cupp can be cast as an off-center conservative because she says that she’s an atheist. This makes her a vastly more shaggable version of “Fox feminist” Tammy Bruce.

Given her looks, her look and her off-center pose, the fact that Cupp is cosmically banal hasn’t retarded her rise at Fox. And that, of course, is where the culture of stupidification comes in! Because Cupp once found a pair of hot glasses—she wouldn’t have made it with her pre-glasses look—things have actually reached the point where the Washington Post feels it must review her utterly banal new book.

Quote of the day

"I spent twenty years in intelligence and four years in the SERE program waterboarding people before I ever opened my mouth on the subject. Marc Thiessen is a fool of the highest magnitude if he thinks he knows anything about waterboarding. His claims are based not on first-hand experience but on a classified briefing from people with an agenda of justifying what was done. That makes Thiessen into a court stenographer for war criminals rather than a person with any real claim of expertise." - Malcom Nance

Now this is "fascism with a happy face"

While the likes of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh - the uneducated anti-intellectual champions of a populist movement which believes in the primacy of "the gut" and "common sense" and believes it is fighting a nationalist war to save and rebirth the country from a subversive, alien, atheistic anti-American menace - concern themselves that environmental regulations or raising the top marginal tax rate a few percentage points are evidence of incipient fascism, a never ending stream of "conservative" pundits promote a bigotry and a prejudice which appeals to the sentiments and emotions that actual scholars of fascism have long recognized to have been at the core of fascist movements. For instance, here is the smiling face of one S.E. Cupp expressing her desire to see supposed atheist liberals eliminated - entirely - from the media



Glenn Beck has himself taken to promoting the pseudo-history of Christian Nationalist David Barton who revises history in an Orwellian effort to lay the ideological groundwork to establish a Christian theocracy. He was on Beck's tv show the other day, with Beck absolutely glowing over the idea of the Massachussets Constitution saying that it is a duty of citizens to worship God. Now, for someone who supposedly hates "big government" I would have to ask this: is there any government "bigger" or more intrusive than one that attempts to command the minds and free conscience of its citizens? There is no greater tyranny than of that which attempts to dictate what a person must think and believe.

Yet Beck, the supposed enemy of "fascism", is busy telling his audience the "progressive" elites are part of a 100 year conspiracy to destory America in order to install a global, atheistic and communist new world order.

Beck and Cupp and the rest of their ilk might do well to listen to a man who actually experienced fascism first hand:

Let’s consider not the banality of evil but its triumph in a deeply civilized country. After the Great War and Germany’s defeat, conditions were harsh and Germans were deeply divided between moderates and democrats on the one hand and fanatic extremists of the right and the left on the other. National Socialists portrayed Germany as a nation that had been betrayed or stabbed in the back by socialists and Jews; they portrayed Weimar Germany as a moral-political swamp; they seized on the Bolshevik-Marxist danger, painted it in lurid colors and stoked people’s fear in order to pose as saviors of the nation. In the late ’20s a group of intellectuals known as conservative revolutionaries demanded a new volkish authoritarianism, a Third Reich. Richly financed by corporate interests, they denounced liberalism as the greatest, most invidious threat, and attacked it for its tolerance, rationality and cosmopolitan culture. These conservative revolutionaries were proud of being prophets of the Third Reich—at least until some of them were exiled or murdered by the Nazis when the latter came to power. Throughout, the Nazis vilified liberalism as a semi-Marxist-Jewish conspiracy and, with Germany in the midst of unprecedented depression and immiseration, they promised a national rebirth.

Twenty years ago, I wrote about “National Socialism as Temptation,” about what it was that induced so many Germans to embrace the terrifying specter. There were many reasons, but at the top ranks Hitler himself, a brilliant populist manipulator who insisted and probably believed that Providence had chosen him as Germany’s savior, that he was the instrument of Providence, a leader who was charged with executing a divine mission.

God had been drafted into national politics before, but Hitler’s success in fusing racial dogma with a Germanic Christianity was an immensely powerful element in his electoral campaigns. Some people recognized the moral perils of mixing religion and politics, but many more were seduced by it. It was the pseudo-religious transfiguration of politics that largely ensured his success, notably in Protestant areas, where clergy shared Hitler’s hostility to the liberal-secular state and its defenders, and were filled with anti-Semitic doctrine.

German moderates and German elites underestimated Hitler, assuming that most people would not succumb to his Manichean unreason; they didn’t think that his hatred and mendacity could be taken seriously. They were proven wrong. People were enthralled by the Nazis’ cunning transposition of politics into carefully staged pageantry, into flag-waving martial mass. At solemn moments the National Socialists would shift from the pseudo-religious invocation of Providence to traditional Christian forms: In his first radio address to the German people, 24 hours after coming to power, Hitler declared, “The National Government will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built up. They regard Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life.”

Just like Glenn Beck, king of the spurious guilty by association linkage, and man who also claims to be God's messenger.