Crib From This Contra Glenn Beck

The diatribe that follows was prompted by having heard an excerpt of a certain very dumb man's radio program, which I encountered courtesy of PhuckPolitics.com:

Now, the fact is that this dude ain't worth it, because unlike, say, Rush Limbaugh -- who, despite having a lot of dumb people in his audience, cannot himself truthfully be said to be dumb, on the basis of his considerable moneymaking acumen alone (and who also isn't worth it) -- Glenn Beck's dumb as a rock. And that's an understatement. I mean, the guy is really, really dumb. Not George-W.-Bush/good-ol'-boy/lacking-intellectual-curiosity dumb. We're talking glaring/conspicuous-cognitive-deficiencies-having dumb. That's how dumb Glenn The Dumb Guy Beck is dumb.

And anyway, I tire of expressing pure outrage (because making normal, intelligent people angry is precisely what Glen Beck is designed to do…to what end is beyond the scope of my comprehension), but what the hell is this guy talking about?

All he does is tell bizarre lies and attack both individuals and large communities in a way that is at once deeply vicious and confoundingly non-specific.

The latter is especially troubling, because when he demonizes others by using insinuations and weird neo-McCarthyist rhetoric — be it cries of “communists” or “fascists” or whatever — he is himself by definition engaging in precisely the rhetorical strategies that are the hallmark of propaganda in radical totalitarian regimes. Surely, even someone as willfully ignorant as Beck realizes this, and that’s part of what makes it so outrageous and mendacious as a provocation.

But what offends me even more than his lies, his slander and even his vulgar and continual celebration of his own ignorance, is the fact that he clearly does not have anyone’s best interests at heart. There is no trace of passion for any human cause — however misguided or illusory — to be found in either his persona or rhetoric.

He does not wish to change the minds of his ill-defined ‘political enemies’: He merely wants to silence them or to destroy them. His attitude toward his own audience (and even, at its core, toward himself) consists of nothing more than contempt.

According to the Weltanschauung he espouses (if I may call it that) the world is a dark, dark place where communication, understanding, consensus and even compromise among people is not only impossible but undesirable, whatever the specific circumstances, period.

In short, he's anti-democratic.

If Thomas Jefferson came back today and saw the things that Glenn Beck says in the name of ‘American patriotism’, he’d never stop throwing up.