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On his Fox show on August 4, 2010, Glenn Beck advised President Obama to "talk to those Tea Party people. They got some really new ideas that haven't been tried in about, oh about 150 years." Apparently Beck has some difficulty understanding the meaning of the word "new."
master of deception
Beck went on in this segment to infer that the President's ideas were written down in 1853 by Marx. "Why are you [establishing Marx's ideas] Mr. President." Beck continued, "It's not even 1848 Marxism. It's much older than that." With "Lucifer" on the display behind him, Beck noted that Alinsky dedicated his book to him."
This is another lie that either someone passed along for Beck to tell or he just made up on his own. Alinsky's Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals is dedicated "To Irene." On the following page, Alinsky cites three quotations, not dedications. One is from Rabbi Hillel, one is from Thomas Paine and the other one is from himself:
Lest we forget at least an over-the-should acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history...,the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom--Lucifer.
--Saul Alinsky
Every time Beck refers to Rules for Radicals, he deceives his viewers in small or large ways. In this case Beck turned an acknowledgment into a "dedication."
Tying the Christian President to Lucifer would be absurd for anyone actually qualified to host a current events/history program on television, but it's been amply demonstrated here that Beck is a charlatan qualified to talk s$%t about people he disagrees with and push his reactionary viewer's buttons. One has to wonder why anyone in the Administration is concerned with something Glenn Beck has to day about any topic, but Shirley Sharrod made it clear that people are listening to this weapon of mass deception.
Beck continued to claim that "big government" policies are in both parties. Democrats and Republicans "are all progressive. Maybe a couple that haven't lost their soul in the Democratic Party and maybe twenty ... that haven't lost their soul in the Republican Party." Progressives should watch recordings of The Glenn Beck Show when they're in the mood for some comedy. All but 20 Republicans are "progressive." That's so absurd that it's really quite funny.
To give him credit, Beck is trying his level best to move Overton's window toward up toward less government actions (legislation) aimed at protecting American citizens in the name of freedom as Beck understands the word. Food stamps, one could argue, gives poor people the freedom to eat without resorting to theft; but Beck does not recognize freedom in a material way. If Beck has to pay higher taxes to help fund those food stamps, that - in his extremely reactionary view of the welfare state - is a move away from "freedom." If shifting Overton's window up is such an obviously desirable direction in Beck's mind, why does he resort to deception so routinely?
Melissa Harris-Lacewell
One of the guests on Countdown with Keith Olbermann on the same evening, Melissa Harris-Lacewell, unwittingly gave the answer to this question in a discussion about the Tea Party's defeats in the primaries of August 3rd. She explained that the distribution of where Americans are oriented politically is a bell curve. In the center, the area of moderate reforms (liberals) and of maintaining the status quo (conservatives) is where the vast majority of people reside. The policies supported by this large segment of the population is another way of thinking about Overton's window. As the bell curve shifts in either direction, Overton's window slides up or down.
Glenn Beck and the Tea Party on the far right - like socialists, anarchists and communists on the far left - are out of the mainstream, supporting policies that are outside of Overton's window and to the edges of the the bell curve of distribution of political values. If the Tea Party's anxiety about the direction of the country becomes more wide spread, which is exactly why Beck is often fear-mongering and flat out deceiving his gullible viewers, there will be a shift of Overton's window upward. On the other hand, if Republicans take either house of Congress in the elections this year, nothing will move legislatively in a government that will be gripped by a gridlock that will leave the country's problems largely unattended to.
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