Charge of the Beckerhead Bandwagon

[Elmore Furth]

Glenn Beck talks loudly but the shock-jock of politics has less magic thatn the Wizard of Oz. He can scare politicians by getting their listeners to make angry phone calls dittoing these right-wing demagogues until you hear senators railing against death panels, but it's really Beck's voice you're hearing. With his show on Fox News, Beck has successfully positioned himself as the weirdo right's ambassador-at-large to the rest of the world. When the patron saint of the Tea Parties lets his freak flag fly, seemingly normal right-wing functionaries have been known to line up and salute. Republicans parrot Beck's crackpot notions and pet issues routinely -- sometimes running with his manias the morning after he first airs them.

These leaders of the Republican party, Beck and Limbaugh, are poisoning political discourse with falsehoods, half-truths and innuendo. Paranoid smears work. Offense is better than defense. The blanket smear where you distory everything an opponent has ever done and plans to do is quite effective. The low road express was popularized by the dirty tricks boys: Segretti/Atwater/Rove. Don Segretti, Ron Ziegler, H. R. Haldeman and Dwight Chapin had participated in the highly-competitive student elections at Stanford using "ratfucking" techniques to win elections. The smear has been a part of the Republican campaign tool chest since Nixon.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratfucking

The appalling thing about the intellectually challenged Beck, like the Limbaugh-loon he so desperately struggles to impersonate, is that he is given a podium from which to spew his hate. Even more appalling is that he is allowed -- encouraged -- to do so with no reservation, no regulation, and no repercussion. Unless, of course, you consider the multi-million-dollar salary he receives for telling lies and for whipping paranoid masses of gun-toting racists into glassy eyed fury, then it's easy to see Beck is hitting the repercussion jackpot -- over and over again.

The rise of Beck, Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and the rest has correlated almost perfectly with the decline of the G.O.P. But it's not because the talk jocks have real power. It's because they have illusory power, because Republicans hear the media mythology and fall for it every time."

As Alexander Zaitchik points out in his three-part Salon series on Beck's background, Beck has always been desperate for two things -- attention and ratings. And he learned early in his career that nothing works as quickly nor as well with the media as personal insults, public humiliation and character assassination.

With few exceptions, the mainstream media fawn over him, laugh at his blatant lies, his death threats and his fake tears. Beck has long been obsessed with destruction -- even murder. In March 2001, he fantasized about killing Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) with a shovel as well as lining up several others and shooting them in the head. On his May 17, 2005 Glenn Beck Program, he chortled...
CHARGE OF THE BECKERHEADS...