| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Glenn Beck’s Operation | ||||
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Wow. Didn’t see this until today. Glenn Beck is something else, isn’t he?
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Glenn Beck’s Operation | ||||
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Wow. Didn’t see this until today. Glenn Beck is something else, isn’t he?
Hey, all these people are just pissed off because Beck keeps showing up the main stream media with one scoop after another.
Demonstrating the sports fan mentality of polarized politics, Bob predictably goes to bat for Glen Beck. Beck doesn't show-up the main stream media any more than Stephen Colbert doesn't show-up Dan Rather. Beck's brand of rhetoric is the tired ramblings of the entitled class, whining about how everyone outside the country club is massed at its gates, ready to take by force the punch bowl and the center strap from the lawn tennis court.
The syncophant posturing as the man of the people is a tired act in politics, an act by no means limited to Republican politics. The frightening part about Beck's nonsense is that it encourages exactly the racial and class warfare that a clown like Beck would decry as the creation of 60's radicals. I mention this not to be simplistic or hyperbolic, but this brand of fear-mongering is exactly the rhetorical tool Adolph Hitler used to rally the down-trodden German people in the years following WW1.
We can disagree on policy, of course, but guys like Beck are the right wing's equivalent of Louis Farrakhan types. Let's call it for what it is and stop reflexively defending extremist pundits who purport to support our particular political allegiances.
Having been scorned yesterday on this site for 'not getting the joke,' might I suggest to you, BMTtheGuy, that you get your sense of humor in gear. I may be wrong, but it seemed to me that Bob was engaging in some tongue in cheek ribbing in his last post. Just saying…
I have no sense of humor. In fact, BMTtheGuy is a thinly-veiled nom de plume for my real name, Glenn Beck.
Yeah, I think that even Bob is in agreement that Glenn Beck is a brainless clown.
Congrats to BMT for dropping the Hitler bomb in the second comment. Good to know that Godwin's law is alive and flourishing, and that the left hasn't lost its charming habit of comparing conservatives to Hitler. Beck's “fear-mongering” rhetoric is “exactly” like Hitler's? Exactly? Quite a claim that. Yes, Beck has taken to demonizing Jews and blaming international Jewry for our ills? No, wait, that's Jimmy Carter and the left. Has Beck taken to demonizing his political opponents as unpatriotic, evil, and obstructionist, and telling them to shut up and get out of the way of the progressive programs that will restore our national greatness? Oh, sorry. That would be Obama and the Congressional Democratic leadership.
BMT, I've always considered you intelligent as well as amusing, But comparing conservatives to Hitler and the Nazis is really stupid, pal. Granted that it's not as stupid as believing that a government takeover of healthcare will improve efficiency, lead to no reduction in services and will reduce costs, but it's still pretty damn stupid, nonetheless.
I know very little about Glen Beck. I don't believe I've ever heard him utter a single word. I will say, however, that if he does nothing else in his life, his country owes him a debt of gratitude for his expose of Van Jones, Obama's truther communist buddy, as well as his work in exposing ACORN as the criminal enterprise that it is. Seems to me that sort of work is muckraking in the grand tradition. Maybe it would be more to the point to address the issues than launch ad hominem attacks on the messenger.
Uh, JMP, if being opposed to being taxed to supply healthcare for illegal aliens and to fund abortions in a national healthcare program, two projects apparently very dear to your heart, makes me an Ann Rand parrotting libertarian, then I guess I'm an Ann Rand quoting libertarian, even though I've never read her, and I'm not a libertarian. It would seem that a majority of my fellow citizens have also recently become Ann Rand parrotting libertarians. I also fail to understand how expressing support for abortion, which has resulted in the destruction of forty million, give or take a few million, unborn children in this country since Roe v. Wade became law demonstrates any sort of “compassion.” Seems to me that it could more accurately be seen as support for mass murder in the name of political expediency, as well as genocidal impulses toward blacks and other “inferior” groups. I suppose support for abortion is what passes for “compassion” in progressive circles.
Good to know Bob that you not only speak for God on the abortion issue, but you also speak for Jews on their demonization by Jimmy Carter. If you had even an ounce of thought beyond the myopic Limbaugh view that you once again have displayed in this remarkable screed, you might realize that Jimmy Carter is personally responsible for the treaty that ensured the security of the Jewish state, the Camp David accords and the peace treaty with Egypt. Jimmy Carter is by far the most visionary politician since Lincoln, a guy who recognized in 1976 that we could not sustain long term an economy and ecology powered by cheap fossil fuels, a guy who recognized that we had to sacrifice for the national good, and a guy who recognized that the United States was fundamentally stronger when it was a force for peace. He was right about all those things, and was voted out of office by idiots like you who believe the test of a politician is how he bends to the greediest desires of the electorate. So we got the Gipper telling us to vote on the basis of whether we were better off financially than we were 4 years earlier and GWB telling us to go shopping when he was starting the greatest military adventure initiated by the US ever rather than to sacrifice to pay for it. Ironically, his own father suffered Carter's fate by wisely saying that we needed to raise some taxes rather than pass on the debt to the next generation.
Anyway, Carter is anything but anti-Jewish. He realizes that unless Israel vacates its settlements to allow for a 2 state solution, its only choices are apartheid or a 1 state solution in which Jews would be a minority over time. His view is anything but anti-Jewish (not that Israel = Judiasm, but you wouldn't know that). His view is to try an resolve conflict rather than created it wherever you can as your hero GWB did. At least Obama is going back to protecting American interests by getting rid of that ridiculous missle system for Eastern Europe, which made an enemy out of Russia. Note that Russia gave us privileges to supply our troops in Afghanistan through its territory, which they refused to Bush.
With your world view, thank goodness you no longer work at the DOD…it's amazing they gave clearance to anyone who thinks like you.
As JMP would say….. Uh…… I didn't say that the Jews demonized Jimmy Carter but that Jimmy Carter demonized the Jews. So you seems to have gotten things ass backwards (as usual). So I wasn't speaking for Jews, but rather expressing my own opinion. I await your apology.
And…..Uh…..as for speaking for God, since as an atheist, or at the very least an agnostic, I don't actually have a belief in God, so it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to proclaim that I think that I'm speaking for Him. In this case also, I am speaking for myself, expressing my opinions and not channelling any Supreme Being such as God or Rush Limbaugh. So you're wrong again. I await your apology on this matter also.
Finally, nice rant about Jimmy Carter and his enduring legacy and visionary status. Yes, he did good work with the Camp David agreement. He also had a few not insignificant failures. Chief among these was his handling of the Iranian crisis, the negative results of which we live with to this day. Second was his naive trust in detente and his failure to recognize the Soviet Union for the monstrous evil that it was. He made the enduringly idiotic statement that we had to get over “our inordinate fear of communism.” As if it wasn't a rational response to fear an ideology that was directly responsible for the enslavement of billions of human beings and the mass murder of several hundred millions. Nothing to fear from that quarter. After his failed presidency, Carter's meddling has not exactly been a force for good. To cite just one example, his brokered agreement with the North Koreans in the late '90's traded various inducements for an NK promise to stop their nuclear program. We've seen how that one turned out.
But I can see that the Carter naive approach to foreign affairs is alive and lives on in a whole new genration of useful idiots such as yourself. Obama's decision to scrap the AM systems in Eastern Europe is a major mistake given our failure to contain the Iranian nuclear program.
BTW, I am not trained as a lawyer and you no doubt (hopefully at any rate) know more about tort law and common law than I. But I have to protest that tort reform at the federal level can not be the impossibility that you seemed to be stating it to be. The idea has been discussed on both sides of the aisle– recently by former Democratic Senator Bill Bradley– and I have to believe that it would not be being brought up and discussed if it were a legal impossibility.
As I have no problem with your tone and simply disagree with your analysis, there is no reason to take this much further….except that with respect to the Jews, you opined that Carter was an abomination (and I didn't say otherwise). As you are not a MOT, it is difficult, if not impossible to accurately gauge that relationship and I simply brought it to your attention that most Jews do not agree with your analysis and why. So no apology necessary there (nor do I require one from you). Secondly, you made a definitive statement about abortion as a fact rather than your own moral judgment (which I would never argue with). That statement is not in line with accepted public opinion polls about abortion (the vast majority of which occur in the first trimester, which has overwhelming public support) and thus the statement that you heard directly from God, since you were stating it as an objective fact. So no apology there, either.
And you are correct, you are not a lawyer. Thus you misconstrued my statement concerning tort reform. I said that the common law and state jurisdiction over cases at common law goes back to pre-constitutional days and is preserved by the 10th Amendment. Certainly, since the federal courts are established in Article III and the Congress has the power to increase the jurisdiction over those courts, it could greatly increase federal jurisdiction and federalize tort claims or by Amendment or otherwise (and I think it would take a Constitutional Amendment), try and limit recoveries of individuals in state law tort suits even outside of Federal Court. This would be the greatest expansion of Federal authority since the Civil War and it would seem to be completely contradictory to Republican and Liberatarian views towards federalism and the powers of the national government. So I think it extremely unlikely to happen on a federal level—it has happened in state law (limited tort in PA, for example).
Bob, I didn't compare conservatives to Hitler. I compared Glen(n?) Beck to Hitler, specifically the rhetorical strategy of playing on people's paranoia and fear by asserting that boogeymen are right around the corner and that the 'other' is responsible for economic and social ills. I would imagine Beck doesn't do it in exactly the same manner as Hitler but this general strategy is alive and well in the 'everyman' approach Beck uses.
By way of follow up Bob, today the Russians cancelled plans to install offensive missle systems in Belarus aimed at Poland and West. Clearly, there was a deal between Obama and the Russians, This is a good thing, not a bad one. We need to stop looking at the world as Good vs. Evil, the most notable failing of the neocons who directed foreign policy in the prior administration. The world is not black and white. The evil is not quite as evil as you make it out to be. Communism, for example, did not enslave millions—Stalin did, and the Cold War actually resulted in an era of relative peace in comparison to the near constant wars from 1750-1918, before Communism—indeed, Communism was a reaction to the nationalistic fury that fueled these wars—it was an internationalist movement that did not intend to result in military dictatorships and has not done so in places like Italy, France and Spain. So aim your hatred at those responsible for war and oppression, but realize that Russia is not evil, Iran is not evil and even North Korea (an artificial entity) is not evil even though their rulers may be. By being a force for peace, we make it very difficult for totalitarian rulers to maintain absolute power in this age of unstoppable communications. When we are belligerent, most Iranians will support their government, as will the Chinese, Russians, etc. This is what Jimmy Carter realized and what you still don't understand. It is not Reagan's Star Wars program (which everyone, including the Russians, knew was a joke) that brought down the Berlin Wall, but the very policy of detente and glastnost started by Carter and continued by Reagan that won the Cold War. It was impossible for the Red Army to control vast populations exposed to free thought.
All we are saying, Bob, is give peace a chance. It works.