(Celebrating the Passage of a Flawed But Necessary Bill, Part 2)Watching Glenn Beck on his Fox "news" show last night was not unlike watching a bulimic twenty year-old force herself to vomit even when she has nothing left in her stomach to puke up. Sure, the terrible retching sounds are there, and maybe a little bile will come up, but there comes a point where, no matter how hard you try, the effort's useless. It's pathetic to watch, you know? And all you think is, "Goddamn, why don't you get some help?"
One can say that Beck's been running on empty for a while now, but last night, his first show post-health care reform passage, was something a bit different. See, because the Rude Pundit believes that Beck wants to instigate violence, but he can't do that because there's an actual legal line he can't cross. So, instead, he's got to work people into a froth, into an uncomprehending Neanderthal rage that needs to lash out its instinctual desire for blood. The Rude Pundit thought, "Someone's gotta rhino tranq this motherfucker before he hurts himself and others."
Oh, it was fucking hilarious, to be sure. Unless you are sitting there in your Glenn Beck snuggie with your Glenn Beck mug filled with Glenn Beck-brand hot chocolate and your Saul Alinsky toilet paper in the bathroom, there's no way to react to Beck's hysteria than with loud guffaws. Because how else can you
respond when Beck compares the painting of Washington crossing the Delaware and one of Abraham Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address, as well as the photo of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima - in other words, two fake pictures and a staged one - to Nancy Pelosi holding a giant gavel as she walks with Steny Hoyer and John Lewis? His point? That the first three were moments of courage and how a laughing Pelosi doesn't stand up to those bits of history.
No, seriously, Beck decided that the only proper way to contextualize the celebration over the passage of the health care reform bill was to say that it sucks compared to fighting the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II. A rational person might say, "What the fuck are you talking about?" And if it makes any sense to you, then fuck you.
Beck went on to say, "They say this bill is historic and that Sunday was a historic day. I think they're exactly right. But you know what other days were historic?" Then, shit you not, he showed pictures of Pearl Harbor, the St. Valentine's Day Massacre (that one doesn't show up on the Fox "news" transcript), Neville Chamberlain, and Jimmy Carter's inauguration. Finally, he showed the Hindenburg burning and said it was the passage of Medicare and Medicaid. Again, how do you argue with that? By saying that ensuring that more Americans have access to health insurance seems very much unlike Japan bombing our soldiers? No, you can't engage because any counter argument has to in some way acknowledge that Beck is operating under a semblance of logic.
And so it went, with Beck saying that America is over, that we're in a war now, blah, blah, blah. He quoted Thomas Paine's
Common Sense again because, obviously, it's the only thing he's ever read by Paine. He kept invoking an America from his childhood and how all of "us" thought that if we acted a certain way, the good guys would always win. "The bad guys won," Beck sighed.
However, maybe Beck is right about something. Maybe the good guys did win,as they're supposed to in his American paradigm. Maybe, just maybe, Beck's right about that. And maybe, just maybe, Beck is actually the bad guy.
(Side note: Beck was obsessed with Jimmy Carter yesterday, constantly mocking the idea that we elected "a peanut farmer" president. He started his rant by talking about Carter and Michael Moore's "fat cottage cheese ass." The Rude Pundit makes no assumptions about the relative smoothness or dimpled-ness of Moore's buttocks, but Beck seemed awfully, disturbingly sure of himself.)
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