This should be pretty easy for Beck to diagram on his chalkboard:
Illegal invasion + WMD lies + civilian deaths + Abu Ghraib + torture + Guantanamo Bay + foreign renditions + suspension of habeas corpus => dishonor.
In contrast, what has Obama done that anyone would call "dishonorable"? Increased our troops in Afghanistan?
Oh, yeah...I think he bowed a little too deeply to someone. That's a major protocol offense comparable to launching two trillion-dollar wars that have killed hundreds of thousands.
If Martin Luther King Jr. were alive today, conservatives would be calling him a Kenyan Muslim Nazi socialist or the equivalent.
"We are a country of God," said Beck wrongly at his rally. "Which is why we oppose the Muslim president and the Ground Zero mosque," he might've added. "These people worship a false God, not the true God."
Beck's ignorance about Indians
Because of Beck's rally, people dredged up some of the stupid things he's said before, including this ignorant attack on Indians:
Beck: S.D. Native Americans "have found something that can be more profitable than casinos, and that's abortion clinics"
What fork in the road did Native Americans take? When did they decide, "Ah, crap, it's just not worth it any more. Why don't we turn our precious land into a place where we can build some slot machines?"
I mean, you know, I'm bringing this up not because I have, you know, huge opposition to keno--casinos and Indian trinket shops; don't get me wrong here. I bring it up because, you know, the Indians are using the whole "You took our land [sobbing]." I think they're taking that a little too far, don't you?
I mean--how good do you feel about giving away the sovereignty now? I mean, when I say we gave them sovereignty, I mean it's, you know, more in a way like, you know, we took their sovereignty and then loaned them a little bit of it back, but you know what I mean. I hope that contract isn't iron-clad--when are we gonna get out of that contract with the Indians?
But I mean, can you really set up anything you want now on these reservations? South Dakota really--they have their hands tied, you know? Otherwise, the Indians will have found something that can be more profitable than casinos, and that's abortion clinics. And then, look out, man--exploiting everything illegal for profit. That's what--I mean, is that what the Indians have turned into?
Apparently Beck thinks abortion clinics and casinos are akin to meth labs and brothels. Of course, he didn't say anything about Bush's obtaining an abortion for a woman or McCain's frequently Indian casinos. It goes without saying that most right-wing mouthpieces are hypocrites.
So 560-plus tribes, 4.5 million people, have prostituted themselves because one tribe considered building an abortion clinic that Beck disapproves of? Yeah, and all Muslims are terrorists because of 9/11, and all Christians are baby-killers because of Wounded Knee. If this isn't racism, it's so stupidly ignorant that it might as well be.
Beck made these remarks in April 2006--soon before I started Newspaper Rock. He demonstrated his ignorance about Indians more recently in Reactions to Beck's Stupidity and Beck's Stupidity About Tribal Summit. It's not clear if he a bigot, a dumbass, or a disgusting opportunist. He may be all three.
For more on the subject in general, see The Facts About Indian Gaming and The Facts About Tribal Sovereignty.
1 comment:
Beck has more of a history of race-baiting than I realized:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alexander-zaitchik/the-farce-of-glenn-becks-_b_692704.html
The Farce of Glenn Beck's "Rally for America"
Throughout his career in Top 40 radio, Beck was known for his imitations of "black guy" characters and racist tropes. According to Beck's former colleagues in the late 90s, this included mocking unarmed blacks shot and killed by white police officers. Such was the case of Malik Jones, the victim of a controversial killing that took place in 1997.
"After the shooting, Beck sometimes did a racist shtick," remembers Paul Bass, a former radio host and Beck colleague at a Clear Channel station cluster in New Haven. "Glenn did routines about Jones' grandmother being on crack. Generally he made fun of his family and the loss of life--as joke routines."
Beck's racially tinged tirades did not disappear after he switched formats in 1999. During his first talk radio stint in Tampa, he often referred to the Rev. Jesse Jackson as "the stinking king of the race lords." Most recently, Beck has worked to resuscitate the names of famously anti-civil rights figures from the history of his adopted Mormon faith. He has respectfully played tapes of Ezra Taft Benson, who thought Martin Luther King was a communist agent out to destroy the Mormon Church (and who once wrote the foreward to a book of race hate whose cover illustration featured the severed, bloody head of an African American).
Beck has also implored his viewers to read the "divinely inspired" books of W. Cleon Skousen, another John Birch Society fantasist who believed that the civil rights movement was part of a worldwide Communist (and, later, "New World Order") conspiracy.
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