Now witness the firepower of this fully operational Glenn Beck
A week ago, Glenn Beck made the leap from rodeo clown to religious icon.
To be fair, rodeo clown is his term to describe himself, and he’s never exactly called himself a prophet. He just says God speaks to him regularly.
And in "Restoring Honor" event Saturday, he actually showed what good he can do.
Beck said that his rally would be apolitical. And for the most part, he lived up to his word.
He asked his supporters not to show up with signs — because you know, there’s nothing like a photo of Obama as a witchdoctor to ruin an apolitical, non-racist rally. And his followers heeded that advice.
Fox News, unlike the Tea Party rallies, steered clear of overhyping the event. In fact, CNN and MSNBC did more coverage than Fox — Sean Hannity interestingly did not even mention it once on his TV show Monday. Keith Olbermann is looking like an embittered jerk for his coverage, which has included this dumb video where he apparently is playing God, as well as non-stop nitpicking on minor factual errors in Beck’s speech. It’s crossed the line to pathetic, and he should realize he is not Jon Stewart.
It goes to show the power Beck (and presumably others) can wield if they want. And how they can, to a certain degree anyway, use it for good.
I guess where I’m going to up my comment count this week is by dragging Beck’s personal faith into this. There has been plenty written about the fact that Beck is becoming a Christian conservative leader, but is in fact a Mormon.
Me, I was born a snake-handler, and I’ll die a snake-handler. If someone who worshiped Pan, the goat god, started telling me how to handle my faith, I’d be wondering at first why he is telling me what to do. But if it was a good message, I guess I’d be a little paranoid. Why is this guy of another faith telling me how wonderful my faith is? Especially if he’s a former shock jock who has described himself as a clown — a rodeo clown, no less.
Of course, I tend to be a little paranoid — what with all the venomous snake bites I’ve absorbed. All indications are, so far, that Glenn Beck honestly thinks there’s a dearth of honor in this country, and he’s the man to lead us back to wherever we were when honor supplies weren’t so depleted. Hopefully it was at a time when black people and women could vote, interracial marriage was legal, and cultural discrimination was not institutional. So I’d imagine he’s talking about the 80s. I’d probably say 1988, Reagan still president, Soviets about to be defeated, no major social issues — at least to the degree of the pre-1960s.
On his show this week, he was back to his usual games, outing communists in the Obama administration and mocking low-lying fruit such as Rick Sanchez. From what I got to listen to, anyway. I’m still interested to see how this plays out, which is one of three ways.
(1) This fizzles out and no one remembers about it in three years.
(2) This is a stepping stone for Glenn Beck to become a full-fledged religious icon.
(3) It’s outed as some kind of crazy plot, the end result of which is outing communists or schilling gold.
I’m thinking it’s No. 1. And if it ends up being No. 3, I’m going to be very ticked off. It means Olbermann was right all along.
