[What they want you to believe about Fire Fighters…]

Pontificating cable gasbag: Police and fire are not in the top dozen dangerous jobs. Most of the time they do, don’t have very much to do.

John Stossel: It’s like you unions are robbing our future.

Glenn Beck: How many fire fighters do you need, America?

[We risk our lives to save yours. Support your Fire Fighters and Paramedics.]

“…How many fire fighters do you need, America…?”

This, from a cable television grifter and poppinjay. Asshole.

The real question is, how many pinheads can you stuff into a Faux News Channel? Evidently it approaches infinity.

One of the side-effects of right wing rhetorical excess is the debasement of political language. During the past two years, as the political and media arms of the right wing have attempted to whip up the base, we have seen concepts such as “socialism” and “facism” used in such twisted ways that they no longer have meaning outside the community of political scholars who still share common definitions. Other words, like “racism,” are becoming sadly chipped away as they are up-ended by the right wing effort to feed white racial resentment. Particularly galling is the usurpation of the refrain, “We the people,” once an evocation of our pluralistic democracy, but now devolving into code for Tea Partiers and their sympathizers.

Glenn Beck’s black magic can perhaps be held responsible for helping to spread this aberration although it cropped up earlier among right-wing libertarians. Locally there is now a “We the People” group in Chesterfield, presumably a group organized in response to Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project, that  pushes Tea Party events and organizes “We the People” meet-ups and discussion groups with the goal of training “citizen leaders.”

If you search the term on google, you will find a myriad of examples that show that Tea Partiers rarely speak of themselves collectively in the first person plural, but with growing frequency as “we the people.” Just a couple of examples: a tea party member from Branson, Missouri talks about attendance at Tea Parties as “When we the people gather together … .” In their Mission statement, the Eureka Tea Party  purports to speak for “we, the people of Eureka, Missouri and citizens of the United States.”

Which leaves the rest of “we the people,” the majority that voted for Barack Obama, with our mouths gaping in amazement. How dare they speak for us! A recent CBS poll finds that:

… 29 percent of those asked considered themselves Tea Party supporters and 54 percent did not. Fully 17 percent had no opinion either way.

“We the people” is 29 percent of the people?

It’s the same tactic used by GOP obstructionist pols who claim to be speaking for “the American people” –  who, incidentally, voted their party out of the legislative majority in 2006. It reminds me of the way that back country hikers are often told never to run from predators like bears and cougars, but stand their ground and try look bigger than they are. Sometimes, I’m told it actually works. In this case, however, the strategy has had the effect of rendering a venerable phrase risible.

One of the side-effects of right wing rhetorical excess is the debasement of political language. During the past two years, as the political and media arms of the right wing have attempted to whip up the base, we have seen concepts such as “socialism” and “facism” used in such twisted ways that they no longer have meaning outside the community of political scholars who still share common definitions. Other words, like “racism,” are becoming sadly chipped away as they are up-ended by the right wing effort to feed white racial resentment. Particularly galling is the usurpation of the refrain, “We the people,” once an evocation of our pluralistic democracy, but now devolving into code for Tea Partiers and their sympathizers.

Glenn Beck’s black magic can perhaps be held responsible for helping to spread this aberration although it cropped up earlier among right-wing libertarians. Locally there is now a “We the People” group in Chesterfield, presumably a group organized in response to Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project, that  pushes Tea Party events and organizes “We the People” meet-ups and discussion groups with the goal of training “citizen leaders.”

If you search the term on google, you will find a myriad of examples that show that Tea Partiers rarely speak of themselves collectively in the first person plural, but with growing frequency as “we the people.” Just a couple of examples: a tea party member from Branson, Missouri talks about attendance at Tea Parties as “When we the people gather together … .” In their Mission statement, the Eureka Tea Party  purports to speak for “we, the people of Eureka, Missouri and citizens of the United States.”

Which leaves the rest of “we the people,” the majority that voted for Barack Obama, with our mouths gaping in amazement. How dare they speak for us! A recent CBS poll finds that:

… 29 percent of those asked considered themselves Tea Party supporters and 54 percent did not. Fully 17 percent had no opinion either way.

“We the people” is 29 percent of the people?

It’s the same tactic used by GOP obstructionist pols who claim to be speaking for “the American people” –  who, incidentally, voted their party out of the legislative majority in 2006. It reminds me of the way that back country hikers are often told never to run from predators like bears and cougars, but stand their ground and try look bigger than they are. Sometimes, I’m told it actually works. In this case, however, the strategy has had the effect of rendering a venerable phrase risible.

Steve Benen, in an excellent analysis of the sloganeering that characterized Glenn Beck’s Besmirch MLK Rally yesterday, exposes the lack of substance behind the boiling Tea Party paranoia. Benen’s post, definitely worth reading in it its entirety, concludes:

The folks who gathered in D.C. today were awfully excited about something. The fact that it’s not altogether obvious what that might be probably isn’t a good sign.

According to Bill Lambrecht at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s “Political Fix,” St. Louisians who traveled to Washington D.C. to bask in the light of Beck, the self-anointed prophet, and his acolyte, Saint Palin, are equally worked up and just as vague about what it is that’s got them twitching.

One gentleman whom Lambrecht quotes melodramatically declares that “This is to wake up the people. The politicians don’t listen.” We should doubtless overlook the tang of sour grapes in this cri d’coeur – the outraged tone of those who thought that the Bush years, with their indulgence of the full range of right wing fanasy, would truly go on forever. That particular speaker though does seem to have awakened – albeit a few years too late.  He is concerned, Lambrecht reports, because he has “never seen the economy so bad”:

It’s time to stop Congress from all this overspending and these frivolous earmarks. I think we’re headed for a collapse of the economy if it doesn’t stop

Similarly, an equally clueless St. Louisian is quoted as saying:

I’m scared that where we’re going is not a good place,” … There is no good ending to this story unless we make a U-turn,” he added.

The fact that the economy collapsed some time ago – two years ago to be exact – due to the ministrations of those applying just the panacea of deregulation and tax cuts that folks like these gentlemen advocate, doesn’t seem to have much penetration among this segment of the population. Instead they seem to derive intense, almost palpable satisfaction out of railing against the very measures that have kept us from the deepest and darkest of economic pits. How could any thinking person want to make a U-turn right back to the Bush policies that put us in the very bad place we were in at the end of 2008?

What is really going on when you have a wildly energized group whose raison d’etre dissolves when examined closely? Several observers noted that the tone of the Beck rally was essentially religious. However, the St. Louis  attendees who were quoted in the Lambrecht article almost all seemed to locate their worries in the political sphere, And, although they might justify themselves by reference to religious beliefs, I strongly suspect that most of those attending expect to find solutions to their complaints in retrograde political action.

Am I the only person who finds this blending worrisome? On the one hand, you have easily led, poorly informed people, seething with discontent, expressing real fear and anxiety about something that doesn’t ever seem to quite materialize in an intellectually viable form. On the other hand, you have numerous interested parties feeding the group’s sense of self-importance with visions of super-patriotism, heroic defiance, and now, with the Glenn Beck crusade, a sense of religious mission. Am I the only one reminded of Father Coughlin’s incendiary radio broadcasts and his depression era Christian Front brown shirt wannabes?  

Reverend Al Sharpton was the first of three speakers (after being introduced by NAACP National Board Member Clayola Brown) at this afternoon’s press conference at the NAACP National Convention in Kansas City.

Clayola Brown: Good afternoon everyone. Good afternoon everyone. [voices: “Good afternoon.”] We wanted to take this opportunity to address the media before the economic justice forum to talk with you a little bit about the One Nation movement. On October the second, the ten-two-ten, we will be marching on Washington with some of the leaders you see here, Reverend Sharpton, Reverend Jackson, as well as other leaders throughout labor, civil rights and the community to demand the changes that we voted for. Civil rights are under attack in this country and even Glenn Beck is holding a rally on eight twenty-eight, which is the anniversary date of Dr. Martin Luther King’s historic March on Washington. And this is certainly not what this country needs right now. It is my pleasure this afternoon to introduce to the mic first, Reverend Al Sharpton, a renowned leader across this country who really needs no introduction whatsoever. Reverend Sharpton…

Reverend Al Sharpton and Clayola Brown.

….Reverend Al Sharpton: Thank you Miss Brown. I come as President of the National Action Network to join others in pledging our support for the march of labor and others joining us on the second of October in Washington. And also there’ll be a big gathering on the twenty-eighth of August, the date that Miss Brown just referred to. Uh, forty-seven years ago there was a march in Washington for jobs and justice, and which Martin Luther King made one of the addresses that became known as the famous “I Have a Dream” speech. It is an absolute outrage that Glenn Beck and the tea parties are coming to Washington on that day, claiming to restore dignity. It is not about race. It is about their belief in government that is so [inaudible].  The idea of the civil rights movement is to get a strong federal government to protect the people against state’s rights that has been those that kept people down based on going by state to state laws. The tea partiers are a state’s rights philosophical group. The cannot march in the name of Dr. King’s dream, which was totally antithetical to their idea of government. So Martin Luther King the third and Marc Morial of the National Urban League and [inaudible] and others will be joining us on the twenty-eighth in Washington. We will not be marching were Beck is. We will be at Dunbar High School and go to the site where Dr. Martin Luther King monument will be unveiled next year, the last monument on the Potomac. We’re not going to react to Beck. We’re going to raise what the real dream was on the anniversary of the dream. The dream was about jobs, the dream was about economic justice, the dream was about making sure that states could not interfere with the rights of labor, the rights of women and the rights of people. You cannot have people who are now trying to have tea party for state’s rights coming and celebrating the day that asked the federal government to overrule where states were segregating and allowing segregation to go forward. There clearly is some racial leaves in their tea bag, but this is not just about race. This is about how you see government. And those of us that see government the way that Dr. King and Roy Wilkins and Dorothy Height saw it will be in Washington to raise the right banner on the twenty-eighth of August and be there in mass with everyone, One Nation, on the second of October. I close by reminding you, if you read the whole speech of Dr. King, Dr. King said that America had given the negro a check that had bounced in the bank and it was returned insufficient funds. Uh, I submit that that check has been written again with an African-American president, this time the bank bounced, ’cause there’s no money. So we really need to press for jobs, we need to press for jobs, economic equity and we cannot return back to states deciding on immigration, states deciding on labor. That’s why we’re going to Washington on twenty-eight, that’s why we’ll be there in mass on the second. We see from Arizona, we see from the tea parties, they’re trying to bring us back to pre King days. While they talk about restoring dignity they’re really talking about restoring a time before the federal government intervened and protected the rights of people. Again, this is not about race, this is about how you see the role of government and how Beck and that crowd sees it is the opposite of why they marched in nineteen sixty-three….

Previously:

The 101st NAACP National Convention in Kansas City

NAACP in Kansas City: Benjamin Todd Jealous at the opening press conference

NAACP in Kansas City: EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson at the opening press conference

NAACP in Kansas City: Sunday – photos

NAACP in Kansas City: Michelle Obama – photos

NAACP in Kansas City: Representative Sheila Jackson Lee on the tea party and human rights

NAACP in Kansas City: Senator Claire McCaskill (D) – “Now is no time to quit.”

NAACP in Kansas City: Representative Emanuel Cleaver – “Don’t you forget it!”

NAACP in Kansas City: Wednesday afternoon press conference – photos

“This is journalistic malpractice, plain and simple.  A reporter right out of J-school would have taken the two minutes necessary to call the San Bernardino Police Department and verify Ms. Kaelke’s statements. But that never occurred to anyone at Fox News before the network ran with the story. This kind of shameful work raises serious questions about the legitimacy of the entire campaign currently being waged against ACORN.”

-Eric Burns, president of Media Matters

As Beck crusade against ACORN continues, regardless of truth or accuracy, Media Matters for America is thankfully trying to hold Beck and his Fox News comrades accountable.

On September 15, Fox News’ Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity both broadcast Tresa Kaelke’s assertion, recorded on a hidden camera, that she had killed a former husband.

Both made a point of highlighting the statement. On the September 15 edition of his show, Beck played the clip and then said, “She never spanked her kids, but she did shoot her husband dead.” Later that night, Hannity played the same clip before adding, “Specifically, now, she goes into this scenario about her husband and the killing of him.”

The following morning, on September 16, Fox News’ Gretchen Carlson repeated the allegation, saying, “She killed somebody? Despite this, some lawmakers want to keep funding the group.” She later claimed that the husband was still alive, “according to ACORN.”

However, the San Bernardino Police Department itself has now confirmed that Kaelke’s claim was untrue. A department statement released on September 15 reads:

“The San Bernardino Police Department is investigating the claims made regarding the homicide. From the initial investigation conducted, the claims do not appear to be factual. Investigators have been in contact with the involved party’s known former husbands, who are alive and well.”

Furthermore, Kaelke has said that when she made the claim, she was seeking to deliberately mislead the undercover videographers, Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe, of whom she was suspicious.

“They were not believable,” Kaelke is quoted as saying in an ACORN press release. “Somewhat entertaining, but they weren’t even good actors. I didn’t know what to make of them. They were clearly playing with me. I decided to shock them as much as they were shocking me.”

The Media Matters video is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…

Irrefutable photographic proof that Glenn Beck is a brilliant performance artist really adept at taking money from rubes:

This post has no title

…It’s over, people. We had a lot of good years. I hope my wireless reaches to the make-shift bomb shelter I built this evening.

Or, Beck could just be psychotic.