also, he talks shit about California. “are we allowed to kick states out?” he asked. who is he kidding? according to The World Factbook, “if California were an independent state, it would have had the tenth largest economy in the world”.

He will self-destruct, mind my words. He has in the past, and his type can scarcely help but do so, especially when well-watered with a dose of national fame. He’ll keep pushing the envelope, gain a few more voters, and then blow past a limit and get yanked off the air. It will happen, within two years, and he will land up the footnote he deserves to be, no more.

Exactly.

I’ve been spent some time trying to get people here to realize the obvious.

Read closer. We’re not mad because he called Obama a racist. That, by itself, is a ridiculous and empty claim. We’re mad because *Beck* is a racist, and his remark about “white culture” is appealing to the racist tendency in his audience to believe that Obama dislikes them and wishes them ill because he’s black, because black people don’t like white people, and because a black person given power can be expected to try to victimize white people with it.

It’s race-baiting of the worst kind, and the reason Beck refuses to elaborate in this interview is because there is *nothing* he can say without either sounding like the racist he is or backing off his claims, neither of which he wants to do. And for the only audience he cares about, the one that already agrees with him, there’s no need to explain what “white culture” means – it means the people who already share the same racist fears and presumptions about a black person holding any power over them.

Or am I wrong? Tell us liberals, please: what *did* Beck mean by “white culture?” Can *you* explain it without sounding like a paranoid racist? Apparently Glenn can’t.

But I’m a jerk for suggesting the 9-12 demonstrators might be racists.

Glen Beck, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh are the mentors, the cheerleaders, the spirit guides of the tea partiers. Each is also a notorious race-baiter.

But the movement they sponsor has nothing to do with race. Yeah.

None so blind as those who will not see.

1) Beck may get bat-shit crazy at times, but he does raise some important criticisms. Don’t shoot the messenger, even if he carries unsolicited junk mail. The things Beck says he is angry and afraid of – corporate interests holding power over legislation, political correctness stifling freedom – may be generic and often vague but are valid despite his rambling arguments.

2) Ultimately, Beck is continuing the Jefferson-Hamilton argument of what sort of government the US should have. He is simply the Jeffersonian side updated to be relevant to modern times: where people tweet mundane thoughts, are afraid of foreigners trying to blow themselves up, and have so much media available to them that they pick the ones that echo their own thoughts.

3) The same sort of dissatisfaction with the course America was taking that got Barack Obama elected is also what drives the people behind Beck. Almost everyone in America feels angry about what the US has become today, and some of those people voted for Barack Obama last year for change, some now thing Glenn Beck’s protests are a better idea. Of course, there are definitely some people uncomfortable with a black man as president, as those protests show.

It may raise the question, but it doesn’t beg the question

Really getting tired of journalists, bloggers, and commentators misusing “beg the question”.

http://begthequestion.info/

http://www.google.com/search?&q=beg+the+question

But I agree with what other on this board say in that people listen to Beck because he says what other people want to hear. This is dangerous, because to a degree, they turn the thinking (if you want to call it that) over to someone else.

If you ever watch his show, he has the same sarcastic, and even narcissistic attitude. His katty attempt to stare down Couric and pretend that this is some hit job was disengenous. If he did not want to run that risk of being called out on other network shows for it, he should have kept his mouth shut. Couric should have pushed him and called him out for it.

As soon as Palin was exposed by SNL, Couric etc., the middle recoiled and she was marginalized. She remains even less popular today. So Couric exposing Beck to a wider audience and then leaving him to look like the idiot he is, helps to marginalize him as well. Wingnuts will always have their heros. The idea is to increasingly keep them on the fringe by exposing their lunacy. Keep ‘em confined.

They only do well when the reporter sticks to the pre-approved questions…