What does it say about our nation that Time magazine has put Glenn Beck on the cover? Other bloggers have already weighed in on the sins of omission committed by the article’s author, David Von Drehle — most notably that 62 of Beck’s sponsors dropped his show after he called Obama a racist who hates white people (presumably his own mother and grandmother and nearly everyone in his administration). Or that the green jobs “czar” that Beck drummed out of office was responsible for the group that stoked the Beck boycott. Or that he was against our health care system before he was for it.
Keith Olbermann, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and others have done a great job of holding Beck’s feet to the fire but there is a danger, I think, in treating it all as comedy. (Beck himself used to stand-up, and in a sense still does.) The importance of his importance is that he lies — consistently, and shamelessly — and now one of the prominent news weeklies in America has endorsed some of those lies. (The fact that the term “news weekly” in becoming as anachronistic as “books on tape” is another topic.) Truth matters, whether it be the president of Iran lying about the Holocaust or Beck lying about how many people showed up to protest Obama in Washington last week.
The Park Service quit estimating the size of crowds in the Mall years ago, so tired were they of being pilloried by protestors of every political stripe for over or underestimating numbers, so the job falls to independent statisticians, who get quoted in liberal papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post. They set the number at about 70,000 and Beck famously upped the ante to 1.7 million quoting as his source “the university of — I don’t remember.”
The university of I don’t remember! I think I went there. When you can pull numbers out of your ass and source someone who can’t be fact-checked, your well into the field of true demagoguery. And while we’re in the land of make believe, let’s talk about that “czar” thing for a moment: Czar has become, over the last few administrations, shorthand for any appointed administrator appointed and not vetted by congress or the public. (Bush had far more than Obama.) But Beck hates them in part because — they’re called czars! As in Russia.
Forget about the fact that the Russian czar, or king, was overthrown by the Bolsheviks and their allies in 1917 and that the commies didn’t have any czars in their government. (Dictators, yes.) You are muddying the argument with facts again! Looking it up is beside the point. History books are as soiled as mainstream newspapers. The left has equally lamentable conspiracy theory nut-jobs — 9.11 anybody? — but so far they haven’t made the cover of Time magazine. Maybe it’s all just a desperate play for readers (the fact that you only see Time when you go to the dentist proves my assumption) but I worry that, in this case, the journal might be right about its pick. Welcome to Beckistan.