Why Are Glenn Beck and His Media Colleagues Walking Free While Minnesota’s ‘RNC 8′ Are Prosecuted for Terrorism?
Real Texans, natives from those parts of the state not dominated by the alligator-cowboy-boot luxury of the oil-pump Petrograds of Dallas or Houston, claim that, even in its death throes, a poisonous snake is still dangerous. Poke it with a stick and, with it’s a final ounce of waning spite, it will snap and try to kill as it writhes its last.
Such is the case with the fading right-wing media and their cohort in the Republican Party, their only hope for continued relevance encapsulated by the fervent wish that the increasingly popular President Obama fail miserably, and take the country down with him. These neocon elite know, even from their musings of history by the dim firelight in Plato’s cave, that a successful Obama spells the end, at least in their lifetimes, of the modern ‘free market’ corporatist-conservative movement blueprinted by Milton Freidman and his acolytes, and set into motion by Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and the two Bush presidencies, culminating in the Dubya-initiated disaster of our current economic crisis, the inevitable historically-repeated result of stealing from the poor to give to the rich.
But the Limbaughs and Becks, Hannitys and O’Reillys are also battling with each other for ratings from a dwindling, aging audience, causing them to engage in a war of words wherein they must out-do one another in issuing paranoia-laden proclamations in a voice of sullen outrage, bray archaic Cold War bombast or, in the case of Glenn Beck, display the tearful, fearful ramblings of a man losing his mind.
Not that any of them actually believe any of the guff they spread daily – they are mental itinerant workers who are well-paid for peddling a continually shifting ideology – when Bush said we are not at war with Islam, he was statesmanlike and diplomatic; when Obama does it, he’s surrendering to our Muslim enemies. When Bush ordered Shock and Awe bombings of Baghdad that killed innocent Iraqi teenagers, that’s understandable – the unfortunate ‘collateral damage’ of war; when Obama orders the three teenage pirates threatening the life of an American citizen shot, he’s killing kids. When Clinton was in office, seemingly his every movement, even firing staff in the White House Travel Office, was worthy of a special prosecutor; when Obama talks about holding those accountable who illegally ordered torture, he’s turning the country into a banana republic. And on it goes, an endless stream of swill offered up by the millionaire shills for the entertainment division of the Fox funhouse mirror of political propaganda, toiling in the fields planted by Edward Bernays, Joseph Goebbels, H.R. Haldeman and unsung laborers in behavioral psychology and mass marketing who devoted their professional lives to convincing the public to buy products they don’t need and adopt political ideas that empty their bank accounts and lower their wages, while tempering their minds to accept ever larger loads of pernicious claptrap that serves the profitable interests of the wealthy moguls who bankroll the whole anti-democratic, anti-Constitutional neoconservative operation.
Every day, in the safe confines of the radio or cable TV studio, these media evangelists of the New World Order wrestle with indomitably evil straw men, unleash torpedos of invective at liberal ghost blips on the radar, launch fusillades of bile at comic book enemies from the Eisenhower era, crucify those they detect as suspicious of Jesus’ divinity or conservative Republican provenance, and, most hilariously, mount fearsome attacks on the mythical Left-Wing Media, the corporate conglomerate parents of which are owned by wealthy capitalists who invest on Wall Street, seek further tax cuts for their upper-income bracket, deregulation for their companies, pay good money to lobby politicians, and, in many cases, own a piece of the outlet that broadcasts the daily doses of outrage and hate to the lower caste of ignorant, addled Proles seeking an easy leftist scapegoat for what has happened to their country in the wake of the misrule of the elite Republican right.
(more…)
Quotes with a Holiday Punch
“How many observe Christ’s birthday! How few his precepts!
O! ’tis easier to keep holidays than commandments.”
– Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack, 1757.
“Jesus wasn’t a Christian, and he never preached in a church. He was also a drinker, and liked to hang out with sinners. We think of him very highly in the Church of Stop Shopping. We put him right up there with Lenny Bruce.”
– Reverend Billy
“Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.”
– Lenny Bruce
“To hear many religious people talk, one would think God created the torso, head, legs and arms, but the devil slapped on the genitals.”
– Don Schrader
“Christian fundamentalism: The doctrine that there is an absolutely powerful, infinitely knowledgeable, universe-spanning entity that is deeply and personally concerned about my sex life.”
– Andrew Lias
“The problem with fundamentalists insisting on a literal interpretation of the Bible is that the meaning of words change. A prime example is ‘Spare the rod, spoil the child.’ A rod was a stick used by shepherds to guide their sheep to go in the desired direction. Shepherds did not use it to beat their sheep. The proper translation of the saying is ‘Give your child guidance, or they will go astray.’ It does not mean ‘Beat the sh*t out of your child or he will become rotten’ as many fundamentalist parents seem to believe.”
– Author Unknown
“I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, ‘If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?’ ‘No,’ said the priest, ‘not if you did not know.’ ‘Then why,’ asked the Eskimo earnestly, ‘did you tell me?’”
– Annie Dillard
“Give a man a fish, and you’ll feed him for a day; give him a religion, and he’ll starve to death while praying for a fish.”
– Author Unknown
“Christianity is not a religion; it’s an industry.”
– Author Unknown
“You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
– Anne Lamott
(more…)