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Published on Friday, August 27, 2010 by The Daily Show
I Have a Scheme
Glenn Beck wants to reclaim the civil rights movement on the anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.
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© 2010 The Daily Show
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29 Comments so far
Show AllThanks for posting this video on your site. I missed it last night. Thanks Jon, you're awesome. Can you have a rally at the Lincoln Memorial next year and stand two steps above the steps GB is going to stand on?
To take a page out of the book of Su Rose. This is clearly a polarization into the Mercurial archatypes' shadow side. Keep in mind that the negative aspects of Mars and Mercury together make for what is known in the Christian world as Satan.
Mercury on the postive side is.. Sound logic, intellect, Syllogistical concrete
thinking etc. On the negative it is incorrect logic, mis-use of intelligence, arguing for something knowing its wrong etc..
Mars on the positive represents the ability to move quickly to get things done. Taking care of business with zeal and energy. Standing up for what's right with vigor etc. On the negative side we have the mis-use of zeal and vigor to bully and take over and trample upon others and fighting or defending the wrong thing.
Put the two negative aspects together and we get a very intelligent, wickedly wise and agressive fighter!
What do we do now?
Jon is paying the only kind of attention to these right wing nuts that is appropriate. Thanks.
Right-wing fascists now using Alinsky tactics. Co-opting civil rights iconography to fool people into following them. It reminds me of Hitler positioning himself as a "man of peace." Beck is a puppet for the Koch brothers and others, his message aided by the likes of Frank Luntz. This is dangerous stuff.
As the American people become more desperate, ignorant, and angry; following a lunatic like Beck...
When the economy continues to worsen, I fear what these poor misguided bastards may be capable of.
Glenn Beck is a jack ass!. What is concerning though is the lunacy that those that adhere to this nut's way of thinking and what they may be capable of as this country continues to silently unravel. It is no accident that our populous is so damn stupid generally. Fascist depend upon those ignorant masses to help support their usurping power in this country. A bad time is coming to America, a time that only a select few are willing to admit. Their may be turmoil in the streets of America in our near future and dangerous people like Beck are helping instigate those ignorant masses to act and act they will because there are untold numbers of Beck sound "alikes". Palin and those of her ilk pose a dangerous threat to civility and non-violent protest. We may laugh at what Jon has done on his show but the danger is real and we better get this fact straight and act to put people like Beck and Palin and others out of the national discourse.
nocall4it,
Good points. And how do you propose to "put people like Beck and Palin...out of the national discourse"? A citizens' takeover of Fox News?
Beck is an amazing uneducated charlatan. He shows how far, with the aide of influential backers, one can go in America. I’ve never seen a better example of a person that represents dysfunctional American society. What’s obvious is his lustful desire to be a media whore and to take advantage of the new mutant Christianity that is on the rise. The best defense the American people have against this addled fool is to reconnect with the original dream MLK had.
Glenn Beck talks about fear as if the left wing progressives used it to create the Patriot Acts, throw us into two wars, cost this country 9 trillion dollars added to the national dept from 2001 to 2009 and that our country's freedoms are under attack.
So , just exactly who has screwed our country Glenn, it was ok for all the Republicans to stand by and quietly allow the Republican Neocon Dictator Cheney to mind rape our country holding a terrorists knife at our throats, create a nation wide spy network and trash the constitution,
But as soon as democrats take that bullshit bank robbing machine by the reins , you want your country back and claim progressives are to blame.
Hey , Glenn , Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr, Bush jr. ,,, 28 years of the last 40 the white house has been controlled by republicans.
Ya, Glenn , I want my country back, I want it taken from the greedy conservative neocon Republicans , and kept in the hands of progressive Democrats, we will fix everything you broke.
We did Republicans stop accepting the truth as reality, our countrys interests are not properly served when 25 percent of the country is staring into the heavens waiting for a sign .
Republicans should stop blaming progressives for what their conservative leaders have done to this country.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
The Democrats you seek ceased to exist in any numbers after 1986 when the neo-liberal right-wing corporatist Democratic Leadership Council was created.
I agree with Stewart and all the other posters that Beck is a braying jackass, but I take issue with Beck's and Stewart's term of "progressive" for the reactionary imperialist warmongering, drone-bombing, service-cutting, bank-saving, mind-controlling government that is in power. Stewart simply goes along with the shadow-farce that would have us believe that there is a discernible difference between the two whorehouses that pass as the principle political parties in the U.S.
And when did this use of "progressive" for the pathetic Democrats begin? It seems to have started, paradoxically, as the party, along with the whole system, shifted more and more radically to the right. In the old days, when the Dems were far more to the left than the are now, no one would have dreamed of calling them "progressive." Some form of socialism is needed to merit that term: as in "making progress" towards a modicum of social justice.
If you want to see a real progressive, look at Hugo Chavez, which our present pseudo-progressive government is doing all in its power to undermine.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
Chavez is more nearly a Socialist than a traditional American progressive. Eleanor Roosevelt and Ralph Nader were traditional American progressives until authentic American progressives gave up on solidarity and abandoned their gumption and Nader gave up hoping that they would organize any effective resistance and starting appealing to liberal leaning plutocrats to rescue America from its right-leaning plutocrats and all their political and media tentacles.
Glenn Beck is a dangerous sociopath and so are his followers. I fear there may not be a way to break the hold this lunatic has on them. Rupert Murdoch of course, is the media monster this guy and other inciters use every day as their megaphone of mass hysteria. The rest of the corporate media tools are guilty as well for not calling this guy out as the charlatan that he is. All of the idiots who profit from this circus atmosphere will be claiming innocence when things turn ugly. It's frightening to be a progressive in this lousy excuse for a democracy. Thanks Jon for helping the sane among us to stay that way.
Good points. Liberal media my ass. They are just as guilty as Murdoch and co.
And where the hell is the african american community? This blatant racism is being carried out front and center in America and no outrage from them???
Where's the march on Washington to counter this. Oh, that's right, it probably would be deemed newsworthy......
Palin/Beck 2012...give America the leadership it deserves...the retarded leading the ignorant.
glen beck has just as much right to pervert & distort mlk jr's legacy as the NYTimes, the daily show, w/the paeans mouthed annually on his holiday (see the two op-eds in today's NYT by herbert & blow; they are in fact worse distortions of mlk j than beck could ever hope to be).
this is the problem w/american liberalism: glen beck is scary for doing exactly the same thing the "liberal" MSM does every day: lie, lie, lie. liberals prefer their distortions from people like POTUS, not country-fried rubes like bush & palin.
you'll never get a "liberal" to admit that dr. king would despise obama & everything he says & does.
"you'll never get a "liberal" to admit that dr. king would despise obama & everything he says & does." Well guess what, this liberal says that very thing. Dr. King would be appalled at what Obama is doing. He stood for all the people whereas Obama is standing only for the wealthy elite. I know many other "liberals" who would also say that Obama would be despised by Dr. King. Dr. King might Love him, but he'd despise his actions.
At least Oprah still loves him. Oh, yes, she's part of the elite, isn't she.
i'm in NW Washington DC right now, at work, so no, i'll miss the chance to "restore the nation's honor." i keep wanting to break out in the strains of "America!!! Fuck Yeah!!!" from the movie Team America, w/all the cletuses (cleti?) and brandines running around.
still, this is what makes america "great": amoral demagogues arousing the bile & exploiting the legitimate rage of the ignorant.
I'm really happy that I do not watch mainstream TV. My parents always encouraged me to educate myself, read a lot and develop my critical mind. Today the world is run by sociopaths. The best way to protect myself is to stay away from those people.
Thank you though, John Stewart, your are funny and often show what type of people like Glenn Beck are. Imbeciles making money by promoting mediocrity. Beware people we are getting close to be another Weimar Republic and I do hope you know what came after. Clue for people not knowing this part of history: A leader who had a weird little mustache!!!!
"To know it is good and to act on it are one and the same."
--Buddhist Samurai saying
It's too easy to dismiss Beck simply as a buffoon. He is successfully preying on the rapidly spreading ignorance of millions upon millions of post-Clinton, post-Bush "Amurkans."
He wields the Big Lie in way that is perceived as overt only by those dwindling numbers of left-leaning but thoroughly disorganized and too easily intimidated Americans who know any better.
What is most evil about Beck in an Orwellian sense is that he correctly warns about an impending broader and deeper collapse of America, and rightly compares America to Weimar Germany--having done his research to know that this is what many true progressives have been warning about for some time: He does this in order to co-opt their message.
But his PRESCRIPTION to "save" or "restore" America, or "reclaim the Civil Rights moment" is what MATTERS here, and that false prescription is scorched earth Libertarianism, which would have government throw all the poor, elderly, infirm, unemployed and underemployed over the side; negate all environmental protections, food safety laws and labor protections; further deregulate banks and corporations of all kinds; end all public education; generally abandon government oversight of anything but the military and post office, and continue the process of elevating the legal fiction and wanton profit desires of "corporate personhood" above the needs of actual flesh & blood human beings, regardless of whether they are citizens or not.
Glenn Beck's agenda is the right of the economically down-trodden to pray, die of preventable or treatable diseases, or starve to death in spreading squalor and ignorance in the streets. He holds blameless the "too big to fail" banks and mortgage resellers (and the politicians who deregulated them) who fraudulently cost millions of American families their breadwinners' jobs. He would leave the tens of millions of victims of these banks, resellers and pols to the mercy of the fictional "free market" without food stamps, unemployment benefits or any other government aid.
Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out the DIRECT cost of un-just wars that enrich a select economic elite to government revenues that would be better used for programs of broader economic & social uplift of the poor. Glenn Beck promotes an agenda of economic and social down-trodding upon everyone but plutocrats and those in the upper-middle-class who serve their upper-class interests.
The ONLY purpose of the dwindling middle-class & burgeoning lower-class to the sort of scorched earth Libertarian plutocrats who bankroll Goebbels wannabes like Glenn Beck is to maintain minimum necessary domestic market share for some of their globalized, increasingly foreign-manufactured goods, and to economically parasitize them in every other respect. This is simultaneous with a process of gradually stripping them of any recourse in the courts, in the media or in politics while imposing upon them an increasingly totalitarian Police State: One that punishes citizens who videotape criminal police misconduct on public property while claiming police arrests in public are "private matters"; wields WMTs (Weapons of Mass Torture) such as LRAD sound cannons on civilian protesters and Active Denial microwave "pain beams" on prisoners, and has created a bogus Military Commissions Tribunal "court system" for the purpose of carrying out politically expedient media-hyped show trials of citizens and non-citizens labeled as "terrorists" using secret Executive Branch criterion. One that uses similarly secret criterion to order the execution of American citizens overseas in blatant violation of the Constitution and due process.
Things ARE about to get a LOT worse. But an authentic progressive prescription for what presently ails us is nowhere to be seen in mass media. What share of the fault for this belongs to America's authentic progressives? That is the question we on this site should all be asking ourselves. We know our cause is good. What must we do to effectively act upon it?
At the least we need a broader and deeper sense of solidarity that reaches across race, income and education level and seeks to create a morally acceptable minimum standard of existence-as-a-human-right for ALL human beings: Decent shelter, adequate safe food, clean safe drinking water, adequate decent clothing, adequate public education for all that includes opportunities for artistic education & expression, access to green public transportation, access to mass media & public political debates for ALL political parties who meet a reasonable minimum membership number, universal adequate, timely medical care including safe prescriptions, and a healthy sustainable environment.
We should continually ask society at large: Do human beings exist to serve corporations, or do corporations exist to serve human beings? What is the purpose of humanity if not to take care of each other and the environment? I would add that this purpose should include the goal of seeking a harmonious economic & ecological balance similar to the ecological balance that nature achieves over time even in its most complex habitats. This should include a humane, scientific, global plan for gradually reducing regional human over-populations to levels sustainable within their regional ecological habitats--the present alternative being spreading resource wars, genocide, unsustainable economic & environmental degradation and mounting millions of annual related deaths.
If we as America progressives, indeed as a species, don't begin to ask and formulate effective answers to these questions, then capitalist resource rape and related resource pressures created by over-populations around the world will accelerate us all irretrievably down the present nihilistic path of spreading resource wars opportunistically intensified by racial and religious tensions leading to genocide of human populations and extinction of millions of animal and plant species, perhaps even our own.
Superb post, metal. Namaste.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
Thanks, Clovis. Your comment really meant a lot to me because things have been pretty harsh lately.
You'd love Guy Finley's hour-long talk: "The Evolution of Evil." Basically, he said that everything tends to evolve to a kind of perfection, including evil itself. Of course, there must be increasing ignorance for it to succeed, but evolving evil also aids and abets that ignorance; it's greatest weapons are fear and confusion. Also, much of what is evil is subtle, and even pretends to be good! Evil is happy to call goodness evil, especially when that 'goodness' threatens its exposure. In a word, people do not really understand the breadth and depth of evil, how far its tentacles reach, and how it keeps us arguing, divided, and fighting as it tightens its grip.
I love John, but he shouts too much. Shouting things does not make them funnier.
Lefties should note that Glenn's DC rally was probably intended as a parody of Obama's Presidential election campaign. This is richly ironic.
As you'll recall, Barack Obama's Presidential campaign--often cited by progressives as "brilliant"--was in fact silly and presumptuous beyond belief--marked by inflated rhetoric, lofty self-comparisons (Obama is Lincoln; Obama is FDR; Obama is MLK, etc.), and even religious imagery. His fans talked about Obama as if he were the Messiah. (This was when they weren't calling Hillary and her female supporters the C word, over and over.)
While Obama was heading up, the rhetoric surrounding him was profoundly silly (cf. Chris Matthews' tingling leg), and I'm sure this bugged the hell out of the Right, who are the sorest losers in the universe.
Now that Obama is headed down, the wingers are exuberantly giving it back to us, feeding us our humble pie, so to speak. My friends, we are being satirized.
Glen Beck For President !!!!!!!!!!!
Because only a nation that has an electorate filled with stupid people deserves a religious lunatic that stupid as president.
And I thought the rich elite were going to run America into the ground, I keep forgetting that they have the money to pay people to help them do it.
God Bless the stupid right wing religious lunatics of America, and forgive THEM for they know not who and what you really ARE!!
BECAUSE THEY THINK GOD IS SPEAKING THROUGH ARE GLENN BECK.
Here, let me end with my own personal Glenn Beck style speech.
" We must restore honor in America.
The Honor we lost when we elected George Bush using the Supreme court to force the state of Florida to ends its recounts.
We must restore honor to America.
The honor we lost when the Bush/Cheney ignored an August 01/2001 intelligence report that an attack by terrorists using hijacked planes might occur very soon.
We must restore honor to America,
The honor lost when we invaded two sovereign country's based on lies ,that did not declare war on the USA, for the control of oil.
We must restore honor to America.
The honor we lost when congress passed the Patriot Acts, and stole our 4th amendment rights of privacy and the ability to seek redress of Grievances.
We must restore honor to America.
We must not torture , or allow right wing religious gang stazi stalking torture networks to operate in America.
We must restore honor to America.
The honor lost when as a free nation right wing religious lunatics are allowed to judge free Americans who dont have the same beliefs or life styles.
Freedom of religion go's hand in hand with freedom to not be ruled by religious lunatics.
We must restore honor to America.
Shut down the 800000 spy annalists and 2000 private corporations being paid to spy on us, and shut down these illegal wars and bring our troops home.
We must restore honor to America.
Stop the bank bailouts, and start throwing banksters in jail.
We must restore honor to America.
Christians have forgotten that War is evil, and need to protest to the Wars, its what Jesus would do.
The constitution is the law of the land, not the bible, or the Patriot Acts. "
Thank You Glenn Beck, for helping our troops and troops family's by collecting donations for them, I have not heard how much you collected, but thanks.
Glenn Beck has no shame, and needs to learn a lot of humility, integrity, and everything else that has to do with being a real human being, but that would take evolution and he doesn't believe in that.
AD
There are no progressives in the Obama administration. Maybe a couple liberals. Most are conservatives as opposed to Beck who is an ultra conservative regressive.