That is the dumbest shit you’ll read on the Intertubes today. And from one of the GOP’s promising young intellects.
I guess.
See, also, Glenn Beck is Martin Luther King. An argument of equal intellectual heft.
August 31, 2010
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August 31, 2010 at 11:52 am
Beck is the reincarnation of MLK?
Sure MLK had some flaws, but c’mon, that’s just harsh. Couldn’t he have been reincarnated as a dung-beetle or something a little bit nicer?
Still, on the whole I prefer Valhalla.
August 31, 2010 at 12:49 pm
Still, on the whole I prefer Valhalla
One would assume.
August 31, 2010 at 3:35 pm
Beck strikes me as more of a Sammy Davis, Jr.
August 31, 2010 at 5:53 pm
At this rate, in about 5 years we’re going to be hearing about how whites used to be lynched and then sold into slavery when they escaped their back masters.
“Please, Uncle Glenn–tell us once more about how Thurgood Marshall turned the fire hoses on you after letting the police dogs bite you in the back of the bus!”
August 31, 2010 at 6:14 pm
instead of reading those things can i continue to rub my cat’s belly instead?
August 31, 2010 at 6:35 pm
As a fan of trolling, I have to admit I enjoy the conceit of Malcolm X and Glen Beck being the same because they both terrify white liberals.
Not so much the actual article in which it appears, which is so damn boring and milquetoast that I worry that Reihan Salam is not a hilarious Something Awful style provocateur, but just a garden variety idiot.
Or, even worse, he may just be a really boring, disingenuous agent provocateur in the Jonah Goldberg/Powerline mold. I sure hope not.
August 31, 2010 at 7:12 pm
I really don’t get this “Malcolm X terrified white liberals” thing. Sounds like conventional bullshit.
August 31, 2010 at 8:08 pm
I’m surprised no highly intellectual conservative commentator has found him to be just like Anton Jackson yet.
September 1, 2010 at 5:28 am
Glenn Beck, artist’s conception:
http://cghm.org/wow/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/diversity.jpg
September 1, 2010 at 7:06 am
The photo reveals the author of Beck=Malcom as some Middle Easteroid Rush Limbaugh:
http://www.tdbimg.com/files/2009/04/14/img-author-photo—reihan-salam_110455132707.jpg
September 1, 2010 at 9:16 am
Beck’s not Malcolm X.
He’s Racist X! ‘Vroom, vroom, I’m comin’ for ya, Speed!!!’
September 2, 2010 at 8:45 am
I hate to spout platitudes, but:
Glenn Beck is the Sarah Palin of idiots.
September 2, 2010 at 6:17 pm
You’re trying to hide a tautology in a contradiction! That was like saying ‘chocolate is the vanilla of ice cream’.
September 2, 2010 at 6:47 pm
“You’re trying to hide a tautology in a contradiction!”
This thing that you have said…it is a true thing.
“That was like saying ‘chocolate is the vanilla of ice cream’.”
Nice; although I was going more for somethin’ like ‘knives are the forks of spoons’.
September 2, 2010 at 8:32 pm
I remember you! You write those great eviscerations of stupid music critics!
September 2, 2010 at 3:14 pm
If Glenn is Malcolm how long before he is shotgunned to death by 2 thugs sent by the RNC for his apostasy?
September 2, 2010 at 9:27 pm
I don’t know why I can’t reply to your last reply, but:
Heh; yeah. Thanks. But they’re not *all* stupid. Some are merely incompetent.
OT, but I want to thank you for the link to Sese Seko’s place. It’s my new favorite tube.
September 3, 2010 at 8:11 am
You can’t reply to my last reply to your reply to my reply to your… anyway, The Poor Man’s impoverished ‘bots simply can’t handle that fractal self-referential recursive postmodernity. It’s way too ’90s, which only reminds Ken O’Kilobyte (*that* impoverished? yes) of how long and far ago were the Awesome 80s when killer copters ruled the air and waves.
September 10, 2010 at 10:02 am
What’s a kilobyte?
September 2, 2010 at 10:06 pm
Leaked footage of Glen Beck’s speechwriters brainstorming?
September 2, 2010 at 10:10 pm
Wait, that was footage from my graduation party.
THIS is Beck’s speechifyers:
September 3, 2010 at 7:44 am
They stole it all from the Anti-Helium party:
September 3, 2010 at 9:24 am
Kleber, in his infinite and terrifying wisdom, has shown me what a world without killer copters will become:
September 6, 2010 at 8:51 am
Because being wickedly funny just isn’t that funny any more, because focusing on the evil far right is as stupid as the far right focusing on the evil mooslem mosque-building terrorists, and because I wrote something elsewhere that turned out to be perhaps worth spreading around:
Here’s the crux as I see it: so the far right has a hugely successful top-down apparatus for creating bottoms-up grassroot movements that the top can use to further secure its power. That’s bad, yes. But it’s no model to emulate. Does the Left want a top down apparatus for creating bottoms-up grassroot movements that the top can use to further secure its power?
I think not. We’ve watched Obama use his bully pulpit to put aside or weaken or literally betray virtually all of the things for which we worked to get him elected.
The nature of the Left is that there is no top we can call on, George Soros et al notwithstanding, except the very government itself, since the Left is the party of making the government work for us, not the party of destroying the government (as the right has become).
Yet the Left is, if anything, less amenable to solidarity because the Left is full of those intellectuals Hitler despised and dismissed for their dogged individuality and reluctance to march in goose-stepping formation.
The Left coheres around ideas most of them based on extrapolations of ‘what if’ and ‘if this goes on’. It is when those ideas become fulfilled prophecy (as in the Great depression) that the Left coheres and attracts much of the center/right. Then things *happen*. But until then, the Left is inherently weaker than the Right in terms of forming a bloc around a few core ideas. Hell, we could only form a bloc around Obama because a) he wasn’t Bush, b) he was a mostly unknown, hence putatively ‘pure’ politician, but possessed the right backstory to credibly appear to be what we were looking for, c) he was born to be a demagogue, having rare communication gifts, d) was poised to be the first real shot at having a non-white president (really a subset of b), and e) campaigned in the wake of the nastiest decade since… (really a subset of a).
He was the top-down around which we might cohere, and we formed great solidarity around him (and Dem legislators), but he friggin’ broke our hearts and yes, the far right is gonna eat our 2010 lunch and they deserve it. We bet it all on a phony loser and now it’s the far right’s turn to bet their all on a phony loser, which they will (Jan Brewer? Sarah Palin? John Boehner? Lindsey ‘Big Boy Pants’ Graham?)
The far right has a set of ideals easily packaged into a simple-minded commodity. Put on a tri-cornered hat, toot a fife, throw around words and phrases like freedom, god, country, constitution, right to bear arms, enforce existing laws…
The Left suffers from a combination of yearning ideals for things yet to be (like gays being fully entitled citizens) and things direly needing solution (post-peak oil energy solutions). The Left, aspiring to progressivism, can’t just sit back in a motorized wheelchair reupholstered as a Conestoga wagon and claim to be fighting for fait accompli good old days. The Left knows the old days weren’t very good at all. The Left suffers the affliction of having an adequate purchase on reality, and reality is a tough sell.
It is when the good old days become the bad current days (again, think of the Depression) that the Left can cohere itself into something that the center and some of the right will also join in pursuit of better (or at least survivable) future days.
We thought that the longest and least winnable war(s) in USA history, a rotten economy, a drop in global stature from beacon on a hill to de facto terrorist empire, and an inability to take care of our own during a predictably devastating natural disaster in New Orleans, etc etc, would be bad enough current days to parlay our hope into change we could not only believe in but experience.
Sadly, no. We bought a finely nuanced brand of snake-oil, far more nuanced and strategic than anything the Koch Brothers are selling to the teabaggers, and potentially more deadly because it has so effectively demoralized the amazing populist movement that gave America its first Afro-American president with a Muslim name that sounds like the 20-Oughts’ two poster boys fore evil: Osama and Hussein.
This blame it on the Kochs/bow to the superior stategery of the Kochs’ noises we hear of late is so.much.bull.shit. It’s all Soros’ fault or something, right? Wrong.
Do we need to organize? Duh. We always need to organize. But just as it takes money to make money, it requires history to make history. Things will have to become much worse before there is adequate consensus on how to make them better.
September 6, 2010 at 8:56 am
I should have written ‘finely distilled brand of snake oil’ not “nuanced’, since I repeat that word as a descriptor on the same sentence, but hey, I don;t have a vain writerly ego, do I?
September 7, 2010 at 10:32 am
In other news, global warming inactivist Anthony Watts tells us that the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in the UK either diabolically adroit or hopelessly incompetent at PR, but it doesn’t matter because either way it shows that the CRU is an evil evil organization!
To make this relevant to the blog post at hand, if Glenn Beck is like Malcolm X, perhaps Anthony Watts should compare himself to — I don’t know — Aristotle. (OK, the obvious choice will be Galileo, but that’s too hackneyed.)
September 7, 2010 at 10:54 am
So Glenn Beck is Obama’s father? That explains SO MUCH.
September 7, 2010 at 11:39 am
That link made me dumber.