Is it just me, or does Glenn Beck seem simple in the head?

[MineralMan]

I watched one of his shows the other day. With today's available television production tools, why does his stuff look like an old Sunday School flannel board story? The show I watched had some representation of an iceberg, with pasted on heads of folks he doesn't like on it. Then, one of the heads dropped down to the area underwater.

I told my wife that he might as well have used a freaking flannel board. Why does he do his show this when they could have access to real production values? That's a rhetorical question. Glenn Beck is a moron.

[bdamomma]

1. that is a prequisite for them on Fox News

[Jennicut]

2. Because he is acting as crazy as he can to get attention.

On Headline News he was never this nutty. He was boring.

[KatieW]

10. The optimal word being "acting". His whole gig is one big act, and too bad that those.

who love his show don't see it that way. He's acting like he does because he's getting the ratings. And it almost seems the crazier he acts, the higher the ratings are. I read somewhere that he use to be a DJ, a shock jock type. That's kind of what he's doing on his show.

[Jennicut]

12. He was a DJ in Connecticut and I used to listen to him on KC101.

He did the morning show in the early 90's here. I was in high school. He did not impress me then and he does not impress me now.
And he still lives here, in New Canaan, unfortunately. Man of the people he is not...its a ritzy, wealthy town more near NY.

[tularetom]

14. Thank you! I've been saying that for months

He doesn't necessarily believe a word he says, it's all a big scam to get the hicks excited. And it's working. The only problem for him is that he will continually have to outdo himself, always reaching new levels of looniness, to deal with the short attention spans and red meat appetites of his audience.

Eventually he'll burn out.

[HughBeaumont]

3. Is his audience "Smarter than a 5th Grader"?

I think NAWT. Thus the blackboards and hyperbole acronym-fests.

[Arugula Latte]

4. The boy ain't right in the melon

Musta happened when the mule kicked 'im in the noggin

[HughBeaumont]

5. "I think this boy's cheese done slid offa it's crackah!"

:rofl: :rofl:

The TeaBirthers must've had a HELL of a time passing that brain around on 9/12.

[Lucy Goosey]

6. I promise, it's not just you.

He clearly has no critical thinking ability.

[Mrs. Overall]

7. It's the way republicans operate now--nothing was as simple-minded as Bush's "they hate us for

our freedoms" or "evildoers" or "you're either with us or against us" etc..., etc...

It's a black and white thinking that leaves out complexity and critical analysis. In the end, I think it will be their downfall as a political party.

[NYCGirl]

8. Don't underestimate him. It's all a very well-paying act. He is Lonsome Rhodes. NT

[rrneck]

9. He's a brilliant media whore. Any further intelligence requirements

are moot.

[FormerDittoHead]

11. Maybe. But for SURE, he thinks his AUDIENCE is simple minded...

His "schtick" is he has to "explain" things to you, because without his "explanation" you wouldn't be able to "get it".

You know what's funny? It's the EXACT thing Christians do. (I single them out only because I'm most familiar with them).

The Bible is a mess. Before the Bible was written (BC) the Greeks demonstrated the ability to write clearly and to the point. They showed how you can SAY SOMETHING and be clear and unambiguous.

Now, I'm sure you've heard the phrase, "Have you READ the Bible"???

The point I'm making is that I HAVE read the Bible. It's a mess. It can mean anything you want it to.

BUT NO ONE "READS" THE BIBLE THEN DOES *ANYTHING*, because it's a FUCKING MESS.

IN LIFE, people are TOLD to read this part or that part, and then they are TOLD *WHAT IT MEANS*. They aren't LEFT TO THEMSELVES to figure it out, BECAUSE THEY WOULD NEVER COME TO THE SAME CONCLUSIONS.

THAT'S WHAT BECK DOES.

He extracts stories in the news, throws in some history, and then puts it all together in a way that only a person LEADING TO A POINT would do.

He's compelling. He's entertaining, and I'll say it, he certainly ACTS sincere.

But if he thought his audience was as smart as he was, then he wouldn't think he'd have to 'explain' things to them...

[no_hypocrisy]

13. This article should explain part of it to you:

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/21/glenn_beck/

and this one:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/22/glenn_beck_two/index.html

"Glenn Beck was the king of dirty tricks," says Guy Zapoleon, KZZP's program director. "It may seem mild in retrospect, but at the time that wedding prank was nasty and over the line. Beck was always desperate for ratings and attention."

The animosity between Beck and Kelly continued to deepen. When Beck and Hattrick produced a local version of Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" for Halloween -- a recurring motif in Beck's life and career -- Kelly told a local reporter that the bit was a stupid rip-off of a syndicated gag. The slight outraged Beck, who got his revenge with what may rank as one of the cruelest bits in the history of morning radio. "A couple days after Kelly's wife, Terry, had a miscarriage, Beck called her live on the air and says, 'We hear you had a miscarriage,' " remembers Brad Miller, a former Y95 DJ and Clear Channel programmer. "When Terry said, 'Yes,' Beck proceeded to joke about how Bruce apparently can't do anything right -- about he can't even have a baby."

[KamaAina]

15. This whole Beckkk thing is starting to remind me of Howard Beale in "Network"

in which a fictitious (in 1976, at least) TV network lets an anchor go crazy on the air 'cause it boosts ratings. :eyes: Then he started playing it straight, the ratings dropped, and BLAMMO! :scared:

[UTUSN]

16. He's recycling this OTHER whackjob: SKOUSEN

Whacked BecKKK's whacked hero:
One Willard Cleon Skousen, who worked/retired from the FBI and went on to be investigated by Miss HOOVER's FBI to the tune of 2,000 pages. I've always thought it was brilliant of LIMBOsevic that his main thrust in attempting to make Conservativism respectable when he first started was to ---purposefully, deliberately--- distance himself from the kooks, the BIRCHERs, the Trilateralists, etc. He would cut off all callers who started ranting on these topics. The same way he still cuts off those true followers who slip and let loose their true racist selves---------------INSTEAD of "disguising" themselves.


************QUOTE*********

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/16/beck_skousen/index.html

Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck's life

Cleon Skousen was a right-wing crank whom even conservatives despised. Then Beck discovered him

By Alexander Zaitchik



.... But more interesting than the contents of "The 5,000 Year Leap," and more revealing for what it says about 912ers and the Glenn Beck Nation, is the book's author. W. Cleon Skousen was not a historian so much as a player in the history of the American far right; less a scholar of the republic than a threat to it. At least, that was the judgment of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, which maintained a file on Skousen for years that eventually totaled some 2,000 pages. Before he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen's own Mormon church publicly distanced itself from the foundation that Skousen founded and that has published previous editions of "The 5,000 Year Leap."

As Beck knows, to focus solely on "The 5,000 Year Leap" is to sell the author short. When he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen had authored more than a dozen books and pamphlets on the Red Menace, New World Order conspiracy, Christian child rearing, and Mormon end-times prophecy. It is a body of work that does much to explain Glenn Beck's bizarre conspiratorial mash-up of recent months, which decries a new darkness at noon and finds strange symbols carefully coded in the retired lobby art of Rockefeller Center. It also suggests that the modern base of the Republican Party is headed to a very strange place. ....

...The city's ultraconservative mayor, J. Bracken Lee, fired him in 1960 for excessive zeal in raiding private clubs where the Mormon elite enjoyed their cards. "Skousen conducted his office as Chief of Police in exactly the same manner in which the Communists operate their government," Lee wrote to a friend explaining his firing of Skousen. The man is a master of half-truths. In at least three instances I have proven him to be a liar. He is a very dangerous man (and) one of the greatest spenders of public funds of anyone who ever served in any capacity in Salt Lake City government." ....

...Skousen laid low for much of the '60s. But he reemerged at the end of the decade peddling a new and improved conspiracy that merged left with right: the global capitalist mega-plot of the "dynastic rich." Families like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds, Skousen now believed, used left forces -- from Ho Chi Minh to the American civil rights movement -- to serve their own power. ....

"Skousen's personal position," wrote a dismayed Quigley, "seems to me perilously close to the 'exclusive uniformity' which I see in Nazism and in the Radical Right in this country. In fact, his position has echoes of the original Nazi 25-point plan." ....

Skousen may have been too extreme for the Quorum of the Twelve in Salt Lake City, but he soon found rehabilitation on the intellectual margins of Reagan's Washington. In 1980, Skousen was appointed to the newly founded Council for National Policy, a think tank that brought together leading religious conservatives and served as the unofficial brain trust of the new administration. At the Council, Skousen distinguished himself by becoming an early proponent of privatizing Social Security. He also formed relationships with other evangelical church leaders and aligned the LDS church with an increasingly religious GOP. ....

..."The Making of America." Besides bursting with factual errors, Skousen's book characterized African-American children as "pickaninnies" and described American slave owners as the "worst victims" of the slavery system. ....

"The 5,000 Year Leap" is not the only Skousen title to find new life on the 912 circuit. The president of the National Center for Constitutional Studies, Dr. Earl Taylor Jr., is currently touring the country offering daylong seminars to 912 chapters based on Skousen's "Making of America." For $25, participants will receive a bagged lunch and stories about America's religious Founders and their happy slaves. An ad for Taylor's "Making of America" seminar, currently featured on the Web site of the Tampa 912 Project, claims that Skousen's book is "considered a great masterpiece to Constitutional students (and is) the 'granddaddy' of all books on the United States Constitution."

Like so much declaimed by W. Cleon Skousen and his 21st century acolyte Glenn Beck, this last statement is fantasy. But it is also a profitable and popular one. In coming to terms with a movement that has an ever more tenuous relationship with accepted fact, we relearn that perennial lesson grasped even by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. Fantasies can have serious consequences.

*************UNQUOTE************

[Taverner]

17. Waiting for the Glenn Beck apologists in 4...3...2..1...

[WyLoochka]

18. Appears to be a "dry drunk" to me

A dry drunk displays the same signs and symptoms as an alcoholic, such as denial, anger, resentment, and spiritual and emotional immaturity.

Fits him to T.

Then there's the brain damage from cocaine on top of that caused by the alcohol.

He was a heavy user of both for years.

[Kingofalldems]

19. Funny how the freepers just latch on to people like him

Pigboy becoming passe', Beck could become the new leader of the repubs.

[Duke Newcombe]

20. Having listened to him back when he was fairly reasonable...

I submit that he knows exactly what he is doing and saying. And that is the scariest part of all of this--he's doing it with a clear mind and purpose.

[MineralMan]

21. That IS scary...

[ThePantaloon.com]

22. Yes

You're not alone - he's got serious problems for a simpleton.