Roger Simon writes: “Part of the reason for [Beck's numbers going up and for The New York Times' to go down] is pretty obvious. People trust Beck and they don’t trust the NYT. Beck may be biased, but he’s honest about it.”
Wow, silly me for thinking that there was a brain under that silly hat, Roger.
Firstly, Glenn Beck relentlessy attacked Van Jones for the simple reason that Jones’ previous gig, Color of Change, humiliated Beck by organizing a very successful boycott against his show after he called the President of the United States a “racist” with a “deep seated hatred of white people”. And dishonestly, Beck has never once made mention of the boycott as a motive for attacking Jones; instead he presented his smear of Van Jones as a completely unrelated, good old fashioned commie witch hunt.
Secondly, The New York Times is a news gathering organization. Glenn Beck is a rodeo clown. Your baseles observation that people trust Glenn Beck more than The Times is laughable. Perhaps your readership – i.e. far-right conservatives who hate the president, who subscribe to “birther” and “death panel” conspiracy theories and who are keeping their kids home from school to avoid listening to the president’s speech – trust Beck more than the Times, and frankly, however, to quote Tom Freidman, these people are “flat-out stupid”, and the fact that it is these folks who make up your readership says a lot about you and your values.
Thirdly, there is no real story here other than the story about a “recovering” alcoholic, ex-addict charlatan who has built himself a lucrative little niche out of being this century’s answer to Father Coughlin and disgraced Sen. Joseph McCarthy -viciously and personally attacking political opponents while simultanously, hypocritically and endlessly playing the role of the victimized white conservative Christian male – complete with close-ups on his manufactured tear-filled on-creen breakdowns.
And this will end the way it always ends in America – a rabid right wing fascist, boldly overstepping his boundaries, takes his crusading witch hunt too far and is met with a backlash so severe that his career and reputation are ruined, to the point that his cause is ultimately parodied and scorned.
I can only hope that when the egg finally drips down Glenn Beck’s face; when he inevitably is exposed for who he really is – as the worst kind of craven, hateful opportunist, and when he gets his own “Have you no sense of decency, sir”-moment, that some of that egg ends up on your silly hat as well.
