Scott brown
is racist, sexist, homophobic, a Tea Party sympathizer, etc. The only one I don't know anything about is the "nude model" part, which is probably just a hyperbolic representation of something I've never heard of.
Comparing Michael Savage to Olbermann is preposterous. Savage is an utter lunatic. He talks about a "homosexual Mafia," and how the government is being overtaken by this vast Communist conspiracy. His solution to the "illegal immigration problem?" Kill 'em all! Muslims? Kill 'em! Kids with autism? They just need a real, manly father to tell 'em what's what.
But seriously, Scott Brown is nuts. Really, really nuts, and really, really bigoted. He's just a really disgusting guy.
Re: FEMA camps, Glenn Beck was for the conspiracy theory before he was against it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izjfdfDHjWQ&feature=related#All of the people you mentioned Glenn Beck "uncovering" were the targets of conspiracy theory smears.
Obama is a centrist. I say this as someone with friends who are real, live, breathing socialists, communists and anarchists - not "socialists" in the sense of "capitalism with a human face" welfare state social democracy like in Europe, but actual
socialists - believers in workers owning the means of production, in the lines of Eugene Debs and Big Bill Haywood. Glenn Beck and his cohort do not know the first thing about radical leftism. They use the words "socialist," "communist" and "Marxist" interchangably, as though all socialists are communists and all communists are Marxists (as opposed to, say, Luxemburgists), and never mention anarchists, because they've never even heard of them. The irony here is, of course, that there's actually a considerably larger popular anarchist movement in America than there is a communist movement. I know anarchists as well as people in Communist Party USA, Socialist Workers Party, Party for Socialism and Liberation and so on, and they will all attest to this.
Beck needs to read his history, gain an understanding of Das Kapital, read about the Bolshevik-Menshevik split and the Trotsky-Lenin split after that, learn about the anarchist revolutions that were crused by Bolshevik communists. He should read up on the rise of reformism and groups like the Fabian Society in Britain, and how heatedly such groups were denounced, to the point where Stalin, megalomaniac that he was, had reformists sent to the GULAG camps or killed. "Reformist" is still a swear word amongst Marxists. A friend of mine who is a sort of Zizekian neo-Marxist, hardly a dogmatist, got frustrated with me in political conversation recently and called me "worse than a reformist." And by his lights, I am, of course - he's right.
So consider this: consider that those cursed "reformist" socialists are quite considerably to the left of the most leftist European governments. Consider then that the largest hopes that conventional left liberals had re: things like health reform have been largely dashed. Real universal health care? Forget about it. Instead, we get a bill that mimics something that was passed by Mitt Romney.
Obama is a centrist. His philosophy is Third Way, like that of Clinton; his economic policies, especially internationally, have significant neoliberal (free market) qualities. That he is willing to reinstate some small measure of the financial regulation we have had in the past is nice, but it hardly makes him a "socialist."
I've watched a fair bit of Beck, as well as other programs I find despicable - 700 Club, O'Reilly, Hannity, etc. Know thine enemy.
The bottom line is that Glenn Beck does not even know what Communism
is. What he is accusing Obama of is not European-style "socialism" - capitalism with regulation and a relatively large welfare state - but
communism,
Marxism. Of course, that's ridiculous; if that were the case, (a) he'd be a bizarre sort of Marxist-reformist-Blanquist, atttempting an election-cum-coup which sparks revolutionary change on the behalf of the workers from the inside, and (b) he'd be nationalizing absolutely everything and treating the opposition as an enemy to be crushed with military force, instead of trying to be bipartisan at enormous costs and passing very, very weak reforms.
Also, if Obama's a Marxist, where's his revolutionary working-class movement? I don't mean the popular movement that got him elected, I mean a revolutionary movement - an armed movement of working-class agitators. The Russian Revolution was not an election, it was, you know, a
revolution. A massive, violent conflict.
Proletariat and vanguards with guns.
Glenn Beck is boxing at shadows. He's nuts. All of his theories are sheer conspiracy, no different than Joseph McCarthy or the John Birch Society were promoting during the Red Scare.
I'm sorry to say that I have very little respect for anyone who takes that man as anything more than a sad, deranged fool. It really
is not about differences in policy or political philosophy; like I said, I'd have no problem with someone the likes of Francis Fukuyama, Ron Paul or William F. Buckley (who did have a TV show, Firing Line, for many years).
Those guys, IMO, are/were wrong, but they're not nuts.
There's being conservative, and then there's being nuts. It's perfectly possible to be deeply conservative and quite smart; this is not about conservatives. This is about Glenn Beck and his ilk: the populist right-wing cafeteria libertarian conspiracy theorists.I can no longer sit back and allow communist infiltration, communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids!
