Glenn Beck has become a cartoon. You can pretty much guarantee that every afternoon, you can tune in and find Beck saying something so stupidly outrageous, so detached from reality, so unhinged in its lunacy, that you just have to shake your head. It's not really a very funny cartoon, though.
Yesterday he treated us all to a long rant about how liberals are indoctrinating our children with inhuman values that are OK with letting grandma die at the hands of death panels, or something. "We have raised a generation of potential killers," he warned, inspired by a letter to the editor from a young woman who wants health-care reform for her generation especially. Yeah, that's exactly the same thing as pushing for euthanasia.
Beck, obviously, hears strange things when he listens to other people -- things they don't actually say. Instead, they seem to be edited by the voices inside his head.
He featured a later segment with right-wing economist Arthur Laffer -- one of the progenitors of Reaganomics -- who tells Beck all the damage could be repaired overnight with just a simple injection of Reagan-style economics. Of course, Laffer neglects to mention that G.W. Bush followed his economic prescriptions (especially those tax cuts for the wealthy, and the deregulation of the financial sector) to the letter, too -- and we can see where that got us.
But Beck concludes anyway that Obama is marching us right into a Soviet-style decline and crumble:
Beck: Did you ever read Pravda?
Laffer: I did read Pravda, as a matter of fact.
Beck: Did you read that? Where they're like, 'What is wrong with the Republicans?' We're watching what happened to Russia -- Pravda gives us more truth than the American press!
He's referring, of course, the Igor Panarin's dire predictions of the fall of America, which, so far, have proven laughably wrong.
Indeed, Panarin is actually just a classic Russian propagandist, engaged in the process of explaining to his readers why post-Soviet rule has not exactly been a smashing success -- by claiming that the USA is about to go into a similar decline.
We had no idea Beck was such a fan of post-Soviet propaganda. Quick, someone alert Glenn Beck and see if he can do another of his McCarthyite exposes.
