Two Comments on Zaitchik on Beck

1. LawrenceGulotta

"Beck on Top" by Alexander Zaitchik

Beck has now completed the building blocks of a New Right-wing extremism. He has added Christian fundamentalist religion, that “good old-time religion,” to his advocacy of laissez-faire ("lazzaroni-faire") Manchester-style liberal economics; hysterical anti-socialism; anti-immigration and foreigner bias and “down home nativism.” Fr. Charles Couglin, Jr., the 1930s pro-fascist radio priest, Sen. Joe McCarthy and Robert Welsh would all be proud. What we see is the modern version of the anti-immigrant Know Nothing Party, the Anti-Masonic Party, the American Party, unfold before our eyes


2. me:

Good post Lawrence Gulotta.

You concisely put a lot of telling things together. And you make it abundantly clear, by noting Beck's historical lineage, that, despite all his spurious protestations otherwise, he's overtly "political" to his core and in everything he does. For him, indeed, "the personal is political."

I quite despise Beck. But his talent for being superb at the crap he does needs recognition. Bad health aside--he may be going blind--I wouldn't be too quick to write off his future prominence or to predict his relative flame out.

I am stunned by the audacity of the flimsiness of Beck's line of reasoning in his latest tarring of Obama, while he, at the same time, ostensibly walks back his "Obama is a racist" assertion.

...No, Obama isn’t a racist. He, rather, is a devotee of Liberation Theology as manifest in the Church of Reverend Wright...

Therefore, continueth Beck:

...1. Obama is a red/pinko Communist/Socialist because that theology has it that salvation is collective, not individual, whereas the truth is that the essence of America's Judeo-Christian ethic is that salvation is individual.

2. There is an ironclad nexus between collective salvation and collective governance via Socialism, which dictatorial governance obliterates the great American ethic of individualism, hence freedom, and obliterates the "Democratic" with which some Socialists malignly soften their Socialism.

3. And, by the way, Obama is a racist because his Black Liberation Theology, via his twenty years with Reverend Wright, commits him to that in its, and his, hatred of white people as the scourge of black people...

It's simply mind blowing to me that this is what Beck says on national (albeit cable) television and that he's so accommodated in doing that and that he can attract (is it?) hundreds of thousands of people to a revival type event and all at the same time make these assertions--often coded--while misappropriating Martin Luther King.

As Ross Perot used to say, as did others, with his peculiar, down home, Yiddish inflection: "Only in America!"