Why Glenn Beck's around may be to remind us of just how stupid some Americans can be. Glenn Beck missed a great chance to show he wasn't what many expect him to be, racist, when he failed to make a statement against Louisiana Justice of the Peace Keith Bardwell, who will not marry blacks and whites in Louisiana in the year 2009.
Glenn Beck
As I've said..
..racism is a mental illness that must be pointed to and treated at every turn. It's harder to do with folks like Glenn Beck polluting the airwaves with a garbage bin full of trashy ideas.
There's no definitive, undeniable statement by Beck against what Bardwell did as of this writing, and his website just had a link to the Yahoo page on the news until even that was removed (but there's a cached version that leads to the Yahoo page).
But there's something else.
Glen Beck has a person others have refered to as his "guru" who for some wacko reason thought slavery basically was a good thing. (Where, for God's sake, do these people come from? Not Earth. They must be alien; and their behavior's questionably legal.)
I'm not kidding.
His name is W. Cleon Skousen, the man Salon explains changed Beck's life.
The late W. Cleon Skousen's, who died in 2006, is also a man for whom FBI head J. Edgar Hoover kept a 2,000 page file on, and referred to black children as "pickaninnies" and wildly claimed American slave owners were the "worst victims" of the slavery system.
Why the heck does Glen Beck back such a man with these retrograde beliefs? I have to agree with blogger Oliver Willis that Skousen's writings comes off as those from a crackpot, but even Willis can't put a finger on why Beck was drawn to him.
But what gets me about Beck is how he hides his own racial issues by calling those who aren't racist, racist for bring up that he's racist. Got that? It's the modern Couch Potato Conservative strategy. Michelle Malkin does it; so does Glenn Beck. And both have no idea what it means to be a real conservative, as Michelle thinks she does.
Of course she's wrong, but that's common for her blog. Still a cool person, just wrong most of the time.
The Classic Conservative knows and understands economics and law and is a policy wonk, believes in free markets but understands the need for government intervention, supports social liberalism and personal freedom but not at the expense of the civil rights of others, and is most of all careful with how tax payer dollars are spent and reluctant to take taxes unless they're necessary.
The Classic Conservative defends and encorages the development of free markets and democracy around the World, but not at the expense of the environment or the poor. The Classic Conservative insists that governments have economic development programs in place to build industry and employ its poorest people, and have reasonable social safety nets for them. The Classic Conservative is pro-business.
If you add all that up, Michelle Malkin and Glenn Beck are not Classic Conservatives. In fact, their ideas have contaminated the minds of innocent people who lack an intellectual set of guideposts to help them steer through the junk issued by these pundits.
I just provided one.
If you want to call a Classic Conservative or "NeoLiberal" go ahead. It's the camp I fall into. But regardless it calls for a level of intellectual rigor that's totally devoid in the mindless rantings of Malkin, Beck, or Limbaugh.
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