PrintSeptember 13, 2010
Beck: The Pudgy Palin Strikes Back
Who is this creature? Who is this Glenn Beck, this FOX News creation, this pudgy male Sarah Palin who talks about patriotism as if he believes Americans are exceptional, about God as if atheism were not a fact? Who, they ask, is this Pillsbury Doughboy of an entertainer who has the nerve to lecture us on what is right in America at the same time he summons half a million racist "lard babies" to Washington to promote God, country, and military?
Welcome to the world of Glenn Beck, the ruling class version. According to our political and media elites, he is the worst racist "peddling hate" this country has ever produced -- right up there with the Florida pastor who threatened to burn the Koran. Never mind that Beck came out against the burning of the Koran; they don't believe he means it, not after staging the largest racist gathering in the Washington area since the Boy Scouts met for their jamboree...and booed Obama, who skipped their 100th anniversary gathering in favor of "The View."
Even worse, he invited Sarah Palin, whose only accomplishment, the Washington Post tells us, is that she is "the mother of a soldier." So pronounced Post columnist Kathleen Parker, who won a Pulitzer last year for heroically braving the wrath of yahoo America to let the world know that Palin, at best, is merely a "sexy" body in search of a coherent thought. If America were not so darned "racist" and "neo-Confederate," Parker says, Palin would be doing nails at the George Salon at the Four Seasons in Washington, buffing and shining the digits of such ruling class icons as Madeline Albright, Maureen Dowd, and Chris Matthews, or supplying the inside layer of a waitress sandwich for progressive Democratic lawmakers who believe strongly in that Democrat proverb (Teddy Kennedy and Chris Dodd chapters, Book of Clinton): "Women should be harassed and not heard."
Parker has set her sights on another Pulitzer and, in Beck, has found the new "Sister Sarah (Palin)." Beck doesn't even have the virtue of being shapely or desirable in that trashy Palin way, Parker writes (hypocritically ignoring the attractions he might hold for a powerful Democratic constituency headed by gay Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank, a darling of the media elite who got caught with a male prostitution ring operating out of his Washington home).
When Parker speaks, the ruling class listens. Glenn Beck is a mess, she says, a psychological and physical wreck that gets a thrill out of spouting hate and "taking others along for the ride." Forget the "Beckapalooza," the radio and televisions shows, the lecturing about freedom. Honesty demands that he simply step up to a microphone and admit to the truth that the Washington Post and all of Obama's America can see: "Hi. My name is Glenn, and I'm messed up!"
Parker is waving the baton for a chorus from the educated class, which believes that a socially just society should not tolerate the pathologies exhibited by Beck. He "betrays the grandiosity of an addict" when he spouts all that nonsense about "faith, hope, and charity"; it is time to put Beck out of his public misery, she says. In this, she shows what one blogger describes as her "pitch-perfect, Beltway-consensus" endorsement of the view of Obama friend and Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, who, noting there is little the government can do to shut down Beck, laments, "It's a free country. I wish it weren't."
"Pitch-perfect," indeed. Parker on Beck perfectly mimics the disdain of the elites for what country singer and Freedom Concert headliner Charlie Daniels calls the "hard-working, God-fearing patriotic folks, the salt-of-the-earth middle Americans who have fought our wars, raised good citizens and kept the wheels of progress moving forward in this nation for over 200 years." That's not the view from Cambridge (Harvard), Hyde Park (University of Chicago), Manhattan's Upper West Side, or Beltway Washington; instead, Palin before him, and now Beck, is "one sick puppy." They see Beck's appeal grounded in "intolerance," as USA Today informs us -- "paranoia" and "conspiracy theories," say Parker and the Washington Post.
Sick, sick, sick, scolds Parker. The "Beckapalooza" crowds were well-behaved and respectful, even picking up their trash and -- as Big Journalism described it -- leaving the mall after the rally "spotless." But in Parker's world, cleanliness is not next to godliness. Instead, it is proof-positive that the New York Times is right: Beck could teach a thing or two to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels about mind control.
Parker, of course, knows a thing or three about sickness. CNN has tapped her to co-host a new political show with her good friend and fellow Washington insider Eliot Spitzer. Spitzer is described by National Review as the "disgraced liberal sex fiend former governor of New York." Spitzer, like Parker a ruling class icon, used taxpayer dollars to subsidize his $4,000-$10,000 "trysts" with prostitutes while his wife and three teenage daughters lived the progressive version of "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet" in the state governor's mansion.
And now Parker is using her Spitzer-like intelligence and sense of honor to bare the "nightmare" mind and universe of Glenn Beck. Just as she did Palin. How dare Palin and now Beck talk about God and country and honor? Parker knows what honor is -- just ask CNN, which described her and Spitzer as two of the "most intelligent" and admirable members of the nation's educated class.
And so Glenn Beck is in her crosshairs. Deservedly so, Parker says...and she'll probably get another Pulitzer, just as soon as the journalism awards panel returns to its duties. They are busy right now: Pulitzer judge and Chicago academic Danielle Allen, for example, is probably adding to her collection of the worshipful "Obamagrams" that she wrote on behalf of the president and that cemented her place on the Pulitzer jury; Associated Press Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll is, perhaps, looking for new opportunities to fake news reports so as to provide anti-military stories to subscribers of the news service; and historian David M. Kennedy of Stanford University is no doubt looking for another chance to display his Pulitzer-judging chops, having written about the history of leadership in California government and never once mentioning Ronald Reagan.
They awarded Parker a Pulitzer for her repeated take-downs of Palin. And now, Parker has an even larger target: Glenn Beck...the creature from the Mormon lagoon, the pudgy Palin in pants who dares talk about honor, loves his family, and refers publicly to God.
What a nutjob! Pulitzer time.
Stuart Schwartz, a former media and retail executive, is on the faculty of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia.
