Jon Stewart masterfully dissected the farce that is Glenn Beck’s rally this Saturday.
Jon Stewart did a pretty bang-up job last night of eviscerating Glenn Beck for his hypocrisies on the eve of his inane rally in Washington. But he left out a couple things.
Here are a couple points I would have loved to have seen Stewart make last night:
First and foremost, Beck had the gall to suggest that it’s actually conservatives, and not progressives, who were and and are responsible for civil rights reform in this country.
“This is a moment that I think… we reclaim the civil rights movement. We will reclaim the civil rights moment – we will take that movement, because we were the people who did it in the first place.”
The rhetorical “we” in Beck’s argument creates an “us versus them” dynamic, in which he implies that conservatives, not progressives were the ones who “did it”—”it” presumably being the passage of civil rights.
Excuse me? Was it not the progressive president Lyndon Johnson who signed the 1964 Civil Rights act into existence over the protests of conservative segregationists like Strom Thurmond?
“We are on the side of individual freedoms and liberties,” he says. Isn’t it conservatives who are fighting tooth and nail to uphold California’s Prop 8 so that individual gay people won’t have the freedom and liberty to marry each other?
In an equally nauseating and disingenuous video where Beck spouts his self-righteous philosophy, he says, “In the history of every republic there is a window of opportunity to reach for that brass ring, or to miss it.”
While I have no idea exactly what he means by this proverbial brass ring, one assumes the brass ring means a just an equitable society. In truth, this country has had many windows of opportunity—the Civil Rights movement of the ’60s and the election of the nation’s first African-American president being two windows that stand out off the top of my head—in which we had a chance to show what we were made of.
Both in the ’60s (siding against Civil Rights) and today (fostering the paranoid fear that President Obama is an outsider and somehow evil) it has been conservatives who have furthered the cause of xenophobia, and not tolerance.
“Black people don’t own Martin Luther King,” Beck says. No, they don’t. But progressives do own the legacy of being on the right side of history when it comes to civil rights. To attempt to distort this history and claim the victory for conservatives is delusional at best, and straight-up insidious at worst.
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August 27, 2010 at 7:21 pm, Doris Brady said:
love this article
August 27, 2010 at 7:33 pm, Anonymous1 said:
um hello – how is electing a black president one of those brass ring moments? Don't you know, Glenn Beck says He's a racist. That GB can call Obama a racist who hates white people and try to stand on the same steps as MLK.. should make any rational human being sick. Mr. Beck clearly not rational. Thanks for the great article.
August 27, 2010 at 10:39 pm, Davegerken said:
I think sitting in Rev. Wright's church for 20 years and listening to “liberation” theology will make anyone a little bit racist.
Of course, for liberation theologists, it is impossible for blacks to be racist because they are the oppressed and therefore anything they do is justified.
August 27, 2010 at 7:53 pm, newsfanatic said:
You make all good points. I would suspect the reason Stewart didn't touch on them was that his show is heavily focused on comedy. The points you make are all good, but Stewart wasn't going for that much depth on what was wrong with the concept. Just having a good ol' rip at the breadth of Beck's hypocrisy.
I'm amazed at how Beck's supporters are trying to defend their attendance of this farce, too. There was a pretty incredible interview from WBAL of a couple planning to attend, which I recommend if you want to be stunned by how vague and insubstantial these people's thoughts are. You can find it right around the middle of this clip if you want: http://www.newsy.com/videos/dc-bracing-for-cont…
August 27, 2010 at 8:03 pm, Parnellij said:
The rhetorical “we” is the people, you dope.
I'm a regular Beck viewer and I must give Jon Stewart credit for doing a really funny bit without making false accusations.
I cant say the same for the author of this piece.
August 27, 2010 at 9:19 pm, Death And Taxes said:
Parnellij, thanks for the comment. I considered giving Beck the benefit of the doubt when I was writing this that he meant “the people” broadly when he said “we,” but his argument simply doesn't make sense in this context. “We're the people who did it in the first place,” he says. Who is “the people,” who got Civil Rights passed? All of us? As in, everybody? Clearly that's not true. There were people fighting against Civil Rights Movement fiercely. It was not “the people” who did it, but some of the people. And the people who did NOT do it, who fought against it, were social conservatives—predecessors of those who now fight against the civil rights of gay people. Conservatives are one side of history when it comes to social issues, and it isn't the side of civil rights advocacy. At least that's how it looks to me. Am I missing something? -Alex
August 27, 2010 at 9:54 pm, Parnellij said:
Yes!!! A two-way conversation. Maybe you're not a dope, so I take it back.
You are missing something – thanks for asking. The media has done quite a job painting conservatives being on a certain side of history. Here are the vote totals by party on the 1964 Civil Rights Act pasted straight from Wikipedia:
The original House version:
Democratic Party: 152-96 (61%–39%)
Republican Party: 138-34 (80%–20%)
Cloture in the Senate:
Democratic Party: 44-23 (66%–34%)
Republican Party: 27-6 (82%–18%)
The Senate version:
Democratic Party: 46-21 (69%–31%)
Republican Party: 27-6 (82%–18%)
The Senate version, voted on by the House:
Democratic Party: 153-91 (63%–37%)
Republican Party: 136-35 (80%–20%)
LBJ gets all of the credit, but Eisenhower did more than his fair share of work on what eventually became this bill.
Bottom line is that there are good people on both sides of the aisle.
August 27, 2010 at 10:40 pm, Guest said:
You mean Progressives like Woodrow Wilson. Both sides have their bad apples.
August 27, 2010 at 11:43 pm, SPO101 said:
QUOTE OF THE DAY:
“I’m wondering if those who support that so-called Tea Party Movement really know where Republicans are leading them? It seems like the Tea Party rank & file are being USED by a bunch of vain, self-serving, evil, power mad, greed stricken, K-Street Con Artists. Paid for by wealthy silver spoon trust fund babies who want to turn the American PEOPLE into peasants. The scum of the earth who hide their hideous faces by using Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin as spokespersons. SUCKERS!
READ: (“Covert Operations, the Billionaire Koch Brothers who are waging war against Obama” by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker
Just look at their agenda items. It‘s like wet dream for Ken Lay, Tom Delay, Newt Gingrich or Jack Abramoff:
Abolish Dept. of Energy
1) Repeal Health Insurance Reform
2) Privatize Social Security or abolish it.
3) End Medicare
4) Extend Bush Tax Cuts for wealthy and Big Oil
5) Repeal Wall Street reform
6) Protect all those responsible for Gulf oil disaster and future environmental catastrophes
7) Abolish or cut funding to Department of Education
9) Abolish Environmental Protection Agency
10) Repeal 17th Amendment
11) Rewrite Bible and school textbooks,
12) Replace JESUS with Glenn Beck, Frank Church with Joe McCarthy…
13) After USA is destroyed by Republican Party low grade thought processes, BLAME Democrats/Liberals
14) be flunkies, soldiers and slaves for silver spoon trust fund babies like George W. Bush, Saudi Prince Bandar and the Koch Bros.
REALITY NOW! What leadership, character or morals have Republicans displayed since Obama was sworn in? NO solutions, NO rational plans, clear agendas or common sense policy… JUST Sarah Palin/Glenn Beck groupies parroting talking points! (I heard rumors someone in the Palin entourage is smuggling meth/coke on the tour charter flights)
COME ON, are you right-wing wackos #*~/‘n INSANE? Am I missing something here but didn’t Conservatives just have 8 YEARS of Bush/Cheney and Republican controlled Congress (1994-2006) to put their warped ideology into practice? AND IT ALMOST DESTROYED THE GREATEST NATION ON EARTH!
The American PEOPLE must ORGANIZE… NOW, to get rid of the Corporate Conservative propagandists before they work the rightwing nutcases into a murderous, Civil War type frenzy. Limbaugh, Beck, Krystol, Hannity, Palin, etc must be stopped because there’s too many stupid, uneducated weak-minded Americans who fall for their crazy BS!
Conservative clones/spokespersons/pundits to use hate speech, racist attitudes, bold-faced lies, fear mongering, psychological warfare, warped interpretations of the Bible and other textbook forms of bias persuasion to create a cult of right-wing dolts.
And don’t give me that line about Conservatives deserve the rights or freedoms to spread their vile propaganda. THEY’RE DESTROYING THE NATION! The rich guys who own the news media might as well give national broadcast air time to Al Qaeda… I mean for all the BAD Republicans have done for the last 3 decades+.
Waste, fraud, abuse, scandal, sexual deviancy, corruption, lies, incompetence, job outsourcing, off-shore tax evasion, union busting, reckless economics, welfare for the rich, deregulation, war profiteering, Constitutional violations AND a Corporate Crime Wave of epic proportions…. The WORST looting of a nation’s wealth and resources in the history of MANKIND!
Where was the Tea Party anger THEN? Ya #*~/’n ignorant hypocrites.
But you want Democrats/Progressives to believe if only Conservatism had one more chance it can work? The very definition of insanity, isn’t IT? Over and over AGAIN! Just separate yourselves from Bush/Cheney… bull$#!~ MISINFORMED people into believing they’re part of a NEW Conservative Movement.
In OTHER WORDS Republican Party talking points are based on the ignorance of their constituents. They revise history and LIE because they CAN… because morons who vote for Republicans DON’T KNOW THEIR OWN HISTORY! This ain’t NO Tea Party… it’s a damn CLASS WAR!
cyberbitchslap2.blogspot.com
August 28, 2010 at 3:34 pm, Slaughli said:
Glenn Beck needs to die he's Americas worst enemy and a very skilled entertainer/manipulator, nothing else.
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