Because there’s just not enough Truth in the Public Discourse, Glenn Beck has launched his own high-minded, self-policing, politics-neutral beacon of journalistic integrity, The Blaze:
The image of flame is a powerful [No noun in original text, Ed.]. It has long stood for a burning truth. A truth that is not consumed. The Blaze will pursue truth. Of course we will make mistakes. Honest mistakes. And we’ll be quick with corrections. We intend to earn your trust and keep it day in and day out with hard work and a lot of transparency.
Needless to say, the Truth is in no danger of being “consumed” or even casually bumped by a passer-by on Beck’s clunky, eye-hating billboard for Goldline and Tea-Party-Hijacker Dick Armey. Nor is it likely to be invited to a Midtown lunch-meet by Beck’s All-Star Editorial Farm Team of would-be Conservative media party-crashers who never got let past the Velvet Rope:
♦ Scott Baker, Managing Editor: Former Breitbart VP of Business Development and co-founder of Breitbart.tv. Also, an erstwhile Pittsburgh news anchor who self-produces a Conservative vanity video project called The B-Cast...which aptly describes both the program and the talent.
♦ Pam Key, Associate Editor/Video Producer: Former video contributor to the proudly racist, pathologically Obama-hating Naked Emperor News.
♦ Meredith Jessup, Assistant Editor: Former associate editor for the eminently non-agendized Townhall.com and contributing editor for Townhall Magazine.
No doubt, The Blaze will fill America’s aching void of Must-Read, Small-Bore, Lib-Loathing Flackery in the Age of Restoring Honor.
I’ve seen a number of critiques of the Beck-Palin phenomenon lately that attribute The Rise of the Silver Slurpers to a simple longing for leadership in these tumultuous times. There was this NYT op-ed over the weekend by Anna Holmes and Rebecca Traister, lefty feminists pining for “A Palin of Our Own.”
Since the 2008 election, progressive leaders have done little to address the obvious national appetite for female leadership. And despite (or because of) their continuing obsession with Ms. Palin, they have done nothing to stop an anti-choice, pro-abstinence, socialist-bashing Tea Party enthusiast from becoming the 21st century symbol of American women in politics.
The left’s failure to nurture and celebrate female politicians has had a significant effect on its policies. In recent years, Democratic majorities and progressive legislation seem to have been built on steady trade-offs of reproductive rights, culminating this year when the first female speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, was forced to push through health care reform with a compromise on abortion financing.
An older generation of female Democrats, including Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Pelosi, are about as eager to mount a Palin-style girl-powered campaign as they are to wear a miniskirt on the House floor. For them, proudly or aggressively touting one’s feminist credentials (if you’re actually a feminist, that is) is taboo. It’s considered too, well, female.
I call bullshit on this. First of all, let’s look at the examples they cited: Clinton, Pelosi and Palin. Hillary Clinton is arguably the most powerful woman on the planet, busily running the foreign policy apparatus of the world’s only super power. Nancy Pelosi is the only female Speaker of the House—ever—and a highly effective legislator in that role by any objective measure. And Sarah Palin is…an occasional Fox News contributor, a former second-fiddle on a losing presidential ticket and a half-term governor who quit every important job she ever held.
Sorry, ladies, but I’ll match our record up with the GOP’s on women’s leadership any day of the week. Sure, Palin has a creepily devoted fan base and scads of Facebook friends. So does Lady Gaga. And Lady Gaga has more progressive policy chops.
I don’t know about the poor attendees who paid money they don’t have to travel to DC and listen to Glenn’s manic-depressive radio shtick live, but I feel personally cheated when some guy talks me to sleep for three hours and I still crave cigarettes when I wake up.
At least Geraldo had the decency to perform a Tap Dance of Shame when he finally opened the vault and discovered it was the place where Al Capone stored his fill dirt.
I’ll be posting links to other media reactions as I find them. Me, I’m calling it the Million-Man Fart-in-a-Bathtub.
BBC has a slidehow here, with Special Guest Appearance by popular flag-drag Transpatriotite Cap’n Crunch.
That vid’s understandably long gone viral (do also check out Dan and Dan’s blog for some more low-key British humor, BTW). Which got me to musing about memes and the similarities between today’s Web and days gone but not forgotten, when song—and, loosely, “folk” song—served a similar purpose in spreading news, opinions, and reactions.
SENECA FALLS, NEW YORK – AUGUST 26, 2010: Citing inspiration from Glenn Beck’s upcoming rally to take back the civil rights movement for white people, actor Mel Gibson marked the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment yesterday in the bucolic town where the women’s suffrage movement began.
Joined onstage by singer Chris Brown and auto body repairman Joey Buttafuoco, Gibson praised the passage of the legislation that “gave bitches the right to vote.” His later remarks seemed to suggest Gibson was confused about women’s enfranchisement, since he cited their votes in People Magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” contest rather than participation in official elections.
The crowd, largely clad in American flag-themed clothing and resting in frayed lawn chairs, waved signs depicting President Obama in a variety of costumes, including a witch doctor, a Nazi and a Red Army general.
Gibson, when asked about his feminist credentials, directed a reporter to a woman he called “Sister Inviolatta,” who was actually NRO editor Kathryn Jean Lopez. Ms. Lopez said Gibson’s depiction of the “Mother of our Lord” in torture-porn film The Passion of the Christ qualified Gibson to lead the women’s rights movement.
Lopez impatiently dismissed queries about Gibson’s domestic violence issues, insisting that his portrayal of the Virgin Mary in the film did more for feminism than “Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Pocohantas, Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, Sacagawea, Susan B. Anthony and Princess Diana all rolled into one with sprinkles on top.”
The event ended on a sour note, however, when a planned address by OJ Simpson could not be conducted due to technical difficulties with the jail conference center video link-up.
Heh. Under the headline “Taking Over the Streets?” Derbyshire at NRO publishes photos from an email fan which the writer avers are “an accurate picture of every Friday afternoon in several locations throughout New York City where there are mosques with a large number of Muslims that cannot fit into the mosque.” Rather than verify the images up-front, he milks their Wholly Speculative Outrage Content, then leaves it to his readers to do his journalism for him:
If this kind of obstruction of roads and sidewalks is really going on in Nurse Bloomberg’s city — where a restaurateur can get a four-digit fine for placing a chair on the sidewalk without the proper permit — it’s a disgrace. But give me the facts, someone, please.
Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin will speak at the Lincoln Memorial this Saturday on the anniversary of the date when Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at that very same spot.
It’s totally a coincidence that Beck scheduled his “Restoring Honor” rally on that date and at that place. He’s just trying to reclaim the civil rights movement. Black people don’t own MLK, you know.
Now, MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech is perhaps the most inspiring, soaring rhetoric ever produced in the history of this country. That makes it a tough act to follow, even 47 years later.
Are Beck and Palin up to the challenge? Let’s compare and contrast:
I dunno. Somehow I think MLK will still kinda own that venue—even after Saturday.
The NIH has issued a public health advisory about yet another outbreak of the persistent opportunistic contagious inflammatory disease quitterrhea among vulnerable populations.
The etiology of quitterrhea is well understood. The causative bacterium, Wackaloonia me-me-memensisMcCain, is spread by contact with exudate from an agent infected with Twitterrhea. This can be exacerbated by repeated exposure to the closely associated logorrhea.
If untreated, it may lead to relatively shortlived, unfocused outbreaks of blogorrhea, which can be remedied successfully by liberal application of topical preparations.
In an informal briefing, an NIH spokesperson reported yesterday: “We’d be more worried, but all the evidence is that this strain of Wackaloonia has one fatal flaw in its genetic makeup. Its half-life among the general population is relatively short.”
When asked to clarify this in lay terms, she said: “Well, at a certain point in the development of each episode, it just seems to give up and go dormant until it moves on to its next set of victims.”
No birth control. No straight divorce. No gay marriage. No justice for abused children. And now no vuvuzelas. Will this be the arbitrary rule that finally brings down the papacy?
Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven. They do not learn this by learning. They do not work it by working. They do not reason it by using reason. To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be broken on the lathe of heaven.
NOTE: This was originally going to be a meta-post on the “Journalism of the Imponderable.” Then I found Chesler’s article and realized the word I was looking for was “Insufferable.” Also, I want Congress to pass legislation outlawing provocative interrogatory headlines, just because.
I mean, when will they stop trying to top each other in stupid claims about the not-mosque to not-be-built-at Ground Zero? Jon Stewart is at his best in this piece as he turns Morris’ ludicrous path of *logic* to make his claim into a counter-argument that Fox News is a terrorist command center too:
