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America
is better than Glenn Beck
But in these times,
insanity means ratings
America is better than Glenn Beck.
For all of his celebrity, Mr. Beck is an ignorant, divisive, pathetic
figure.
On the anniversary of the great 1963 March on Washington he will stand
in the shadows of giants —
Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Who do you
think is more representative of this nation?
Consider a brief sampling of their rhetoric.
Lincoln: “A house divided
against itself cannot stand.”
King: “Never succumb to the
temptation of becoming bitter.”
Beck: “I think the president is
a racist.”
Washington was on edge on the
morning of Aug. 28, 1963. The climax of the day was Dr. King’s
transcendent
“I Have a Dream” speech. This is the historical legacy that Glenn Beck,
a small man with a mean message,
has chosen to tread upon with his cynical rally on Saturday at that
very same Lincoln Memorial.
Beck is a provocateur who likes to play with matches in the tinderbox
of racial and ethnic confrontation.
He seems oblivious to the real danger of his execrable behavior. He
famously described President Obama
as a man “who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white
culture.”
He is an integral part of the vicious effort by the Tea Party and other
elements of the right wing to portray
Obama as somehow alien, a strange figure who is separate and apart from
— outside of — ordinary
American life. As the watchdog group Media Matters for America has
noted, Beck said of the president,
“He chose to use the name, Barack, for a reason, to identify not with
America — you don’t take the name
Barack to identify with America. You take the name Barack to identify,
with what? Your heritage?
The heritage, maybe, of your father in Kenya, who is a radical?”
Facts and reality mean nothing to
Beck. And there is no road too low for him to slither upon.
He makes you want to take a shower.