From Media Matters--Glenn Beck: Media Matters' 2009 Misinformer of the Year:

Glenn Beck's well of ridiculous was deep and poisonous before he launched his Fox News show, but the inauguration of the 44th president of the United States -- and the permissive cheerleading of his Fox News honchos -- uncorked the former Morning Zoo shock jock's unique brand of vitriol, stage theatrics, and hyperbolic fright, making him an easy choice for Media Matters' 2009 Misinformer of the Year.

When he wasn't calling the president a racist, portraying progressive leaders as vampires who can only be stopped by "driv[ing] a stake through the heart of the bloodsuckers," or pushing the legitimacy of seceding from the country, Beck obsessively compared Democrats in Washington to Nazis and fascists and "the early days of Adolf Hitler." He wondered, "Is this where we're headed," while showing images of Hitler, Stalin, and Lenin; decoded the secret language of Marxists; and compared the government to "heroin pushers" who were "using smiley-faced fascism to grow the nanny state."

Like his predecessor, Beck spat on scruples, frequently announcing his goal to get administration officials fired. He increasingly acted not as a media figure, but as the head of a political movement, while helping to bring fringe conspiracies of a one-world government into the national discourse.

And he all too frequently helped to set the mainstream media's agenda.

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Crooks and Liars has done our fair share of covering Beck's insanity as well if you've got the stomach for it. Hats off to Dave for managing to stomach him night after night for the better part of our coverage, and to the folks at the invaluable Media Matters who not only monitor his television show, but his radio show.

I'm reminded of Al Franken talking about the interns he hired to help him research his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them and that they were complaining to him that having to watch Fox was making them physically ill and Jon Stewart watching Sean Hannity and waiting for him to apologize for his show's "mistake" airing the wrong protest footage and saying it wasn't worth it to have to sit through the entire show to finally see the apology at the end of it. Franken interns and Jon Stewart -- any of us that monitor Fox News and especially Glenn Beck can definitely relate.

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Glenn Beck hosted one of his hourlong sessions before a studio audience talking about the role of heroes in American life. The consensus, both by Beck and his panelists, was that Americans no longer look up to their historic heroes the way they should. Instead, as Beck suggested, we have "Mao Tse Tung hanging in our White House."

Say again? Oh yeah -- the Obama administration is riddled with radical Marxist revolutionaries. Right. Tell that to progressives right now. Moron.

Anyway, Beck apparently draws the line when it comes to the possibility, heaven forfend, Obama might be regarded as a hero:

Beck: I'm a big visual guy. And if you look at the way Barack Obama was imaged -- he was, as a savior. He was, as a -- you look at it now, anybody notice -- you watch the newspaper, and you watch the photos of him coming out of the White House, almost always, they'll have a shot of him with the seal of the President -- you notice that? And it almost looks like a halo. They'll take a shot from the side, and he's standing there, and it looks like a Russian icon!

He's talking about the photos of the president that have been shot for some time now whenever there's a press appearance at the White House. And it didn't start with Obama:

Indeed, if we're suddenly all worried about presidents being made out to be heroes, you have to wonder where Beck was when W. strutted out to his "Mission Accomplished" photo-op:

Now that's what I call an action hero.

Fortunately, Obama has spared us any codpiece appearances.

Oh Jeez. If I had known you could do this, I would have had Jamie, our tech god, set up a page for me. My needs are pretty basic; I don't want or need a $150,000 car:

While Glenn Beck has meet with former Presidents, had dinners with Governors and played with dolls at a Super Bowl party - there is one thing he's never done, he's never been the owner of a a Mercedes S600. Now is your chance to real make a difference in someone's life.

One dollar at a time the Glenn Beck Program is working to fund the Glenn Beck New Car Fund. This event will not be funded by any corporations. This event will not be funded by radio stations. This event will be funded by YOU. Please, send $1 dollar only per each person in your home. We will not accept donations in excess of $1 per person in your home. Our goal is $147,625.

O.M.F.G. Does anyone think he was able to find 150,000 saps willing to buy the man the top of the line Mercedes he had the hubris to demand?

Wonder how all those idiots feel now that they funded this welfare queen with an estimated annual income of $23 million. Apparently, the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" lesson is for others.

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Chris Matthews and his panel name Beck, Limbaugh, Palin, the birthers and their ilk and white tribalism as the plague of 2009. The right wingers will of course take this as proof that Matthews is part of that 'librul' media and complain about the tingle up his leg while forgetting about Mitten's chin and Grandpa Fred's Aqua Velva.

MATTHEWS: Welcome back. And more of our look back at this year. Next category, we're calling it a "Plague on All Our Houses." First, swine flu – now, that was a big, big deal this year. The birthers, another kind of plague, the people who pushed the idea that Barack Obama was not born in America. Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and their ilk -– the nutty talk went off the rails this past summer. Here is Beck:

GLENN BECK: This President, I think, has exposed himself as a guy over and over and over again who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture. I don't know what it is.

BECK: This guy is, I believe, a racist.

MATTHEWS: And our last plague, those reality TV wannabes. The balloon family and those White House gate crashers. Howard, another rich list. By the way, Glenn Beck, white people. What's that supposed to mean?

HOWARD FINEMAN: Well, it's hard not to name him the "Plague of the Year." And not for ideological reasons. Because I think the name calling, the shameless name calling, and stirring up of the worst in our society is something that should be condemned. It was a year ago, almost a year ago, that we were all out there on the mall, when Barack Obama was sworn in as President, one of the great moments in American history, no matter what your politics are, no matter who you are, where you come from, and to sort of drag all that through the mud I think is a plague.

MATTHEWS: Yes, bring back tribalism.

FINEMAN: Yeah, exactly.

KATTY KAY: I would say the birthers, and I think because it's insidious...

MATTHEWS: Same deal, by the way.

KAY: I think it’s a similar deal, and with the birthers, it's getting at this idea that Americans somehow don't like anything that's foreign, that anything that's foreign is suspicious. And there's no evidence of this. And the way that people like Sarah Palin have said this is an issue without actually coming out straight and saying I think he wasn't born in America. There’s a very mean-spiritedness about the birthers, I find, worrying about...

MATTHEWS: I think it’s tribalism, white tribalism.

NORAH O’DONNELL: It is, and it's an effort to delegitimize the President in some way, to offer an ad hominem attack in many ways...

KAY: Without even straight-up attacking.

O’DONNELL: ...suggesting he’s not credible, he’s not American. And it’s sort of a way to – it’s racist in many ways to do it.

MATTHEWS: John, you've got a book coming out, a big one, coming out very early this year, right at the new year time. And you’re going to be on here to talk about it. Was this something that was simmering, this sort of tribalistic resentment of Barack Obama being what he is?

JOHN HEILEMANN: Yeah, it’s funny, you know, people forget that this happened at the end of general election in 2008 where John McCain and Sarah Palin were out at their rallies and you started to see, when she started to talk about how he was palling around with terrorists, you started to see the early incipient kind of signs of what became the birther movement, where you’d have people standing up calling him a socialist, calling him a communist...

MATTHEWS: Yeah.

HEILEMANN: ...calling him an Arab. You know, that stuff was out there, and you only saw it at the very, very end. And by that point, Obama was so far ahead that people kind of ignored it. But it was there and they activated it.

MATTHEWS: And did you hear that Palin was saying that later on, more recently, she wished they’d done more of that Reverend Wright stuff, more of that ethnic stuff, that racial stuff? She wanted to push that.

HEILEMANN: She was very unhappy about going after Reverend Wright.

MATTHEWS: To John McCain’s lasting credit he refused to play the racial card, which is always easy to play in this country, as we’ve seen.

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Last night on Bill O'Reilly's Fox News show, Glenn Beck made his weekly appearance and was shocked to learn from O'Reilly that White House Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett was upset with him, and wanted to know why Beck was after her.

Beck either feigned amnesia, or he's a complete psycho who manages to obliterate any memory of his vicious verbal assaults on various individuals:

O'Reilly: She goes -- and she was very nice by the way -- 'What is his problem with me?' So here you are -- what is your problem with Valerie Jarrett?

Beck: I don't think I've -- I've mentioned Valerie Jarrett maybe a couple of times in the last year.

O'Reilly: She was very, very upset.

...

Beck: I don't know what I've said about Valerie Jarrett other than she is the Karen Hughes, if you will -- she's a huge player. She considers herself, uh, family. And I believe he considers her family.

O'Reilly: Is that bad?

Beck: No, no. I'm just saying she is very, very tight there. And she is one of the big players.

See, now this is why Whoopi Goldberg called Beck a "lying sack of dog mess." Because Jarrett has been a regular pinata on Beck's show. How many times has he played that tape of Jarrett praising Van Jones? We lost count, actually.

More importantly, it was just Sept. 30 when Beck devoted an entire twenty-minute segment to attacking Jarrett, placing her at the epicenter of the vast conspiracy or black radical Marxists who had infested the White House.

We've excerpted the more interesting parts of this attack:

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The day before this, he'd smeared her for her role in the Chicago Olympics bid, claiming she was a slumlord: "And Valerie Jarrett, some people say she was a slumlord, and she may personally benefit." He later added:

Beck: Is Valerie Jarrett, is it possible that she is going to benefit if the Olympics come to Chicago?

Caddell: Well, that's the word. She certainly had a lot of dealings going on in real estate.

He returned to the subject on his Sept. 3 show, when Beck invited Michelle Malkin on to slag Jarrett: "This woman is the consigliere not just to Barack Obama but to Michelle Obama as well, who shares these black nationalist and radical tendencies throughout their whole career."

I expect a Lexis/Nexis search would show that, besides the more outrageous smears, Jarrett has been mentioned on Beck's show at least twenty other times.

Beck is just flatly lying. But then, that's hardly news anymore, I guess.

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December 18, 2009 NBC The Jay Leno Show

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Glenn Beck invited on professional liar and smear artist Michael Goldfarb -- whose skill at distorting and misleading and obfuscating we have some personal experience with -- to promote Beck's latest ginned-up-out-of-nothing "scandal", namely, the claim that the White House threatened Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska with yanking Offut Air Force Base if he didn't play ball on the health-care reform bill.

Well, as Media Matters observes, this story has in fact been denied by all the parties involved, including Sen. Nelson's office:

His spokesman quickly dismissed a report by conservative columnist Michelle Malkin that Nelson was even being threatened with “closure of an air force base,” presumably Offutt Air Force Base, which is south of Omaha and home of U.S. Strategic Command. Malkin also said Nelson has been promised a “bribe bigger than Sen. Landrieu's.”

That's a reference to Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu, a Democrat and one of the last holdouts on the vote to begin the health care debate. The legislation includes a provision to increase Louisiana's Medicaid funds that Landrieu says is worth $300 million.

Nelson spokesman Jake Thompson said both of Malkin's claims about Nelson are false.

“The rumor is not true,” Thompson said. “This misinformation is coming from inside-the-Beltway partisans who only want to derail health care reform.”

White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer likewise chimed in:

Proving that they will leave no stone unturned in their efforts to undermine health reform, some blogs opposing reform are now trafficking an absurd rumor that Nebraska's Offutt Air Force Base is being threatened over Senator Ben Nelson's vote on the Senate reform bill.

To be perfectly clear: these rumors are completely baseless and false.

These denials, of course, were a matter of public record well before Beck went on the air. Not that dishonest hacks like Beck and Goldfarb would have informed the public of their existence.

Indeed, you'll see that Goldfarb has to start out retracting one of the key elements of his original reportage -- that it was Rahm Emanuel who had made the call. As you can see, he has to explain that this was false, though he does not use that word.

Ultimately, his only source for this story is an anonymous, unidentified "Senate staffer".

But wingnuts are never content to just call an unconfirmed rumor an unconfirmed rumor (unless it's one that makes wingnuts look bad). So of course the shrinking contingent of wingnuts in the Senate, led by moral paragon Sen. John Ensign, R-C Street, is demanding an investigation.

Now Goldfarb is using that fact to continue defending his disappearing "scandal", illustrating just how deeply these guys are breathing their own exhaust:

They protest a little too much. I do not know this story is "absolutely false." To the contrary, I'm confident it's true. Twenty senators are now calling for an investigation, and each is presumably pretty well sourced in the Senate. If the charges are "absolutely false," maybe the White House will encourage Senate Democrats to call this Republican bluff. I won't hold my breath.

And we won't hold our breath waiting for a correction when Goldfarb is eventually proven wrong once again.

Meanwhile, Sen. Nelson is calling it "yellow journalism at its worst." Sounds about right.

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The rightie tighties have their knickers in a wad because Jane Hamsher decided to point out that Joe Lieberman's wife not only made large sums annually on the payroll of insurance companies -- which creates a clear conflict of interest for Lieberman in taking a lead role in killing health-care reform -- but also in fact collects money from the Susan G. Komen Foundation as a "global ambassador" for women's health. Jane organized a campaign to have her removed.

Factually and logically, Jane's right that it's silly for outfits like Komen to be underwriting someone who has so badly damaged the ability of millions of women to obtain health-care insurance. But facts and logic have nothing to do with the world of right-wing nutcases.

Particularly those at Fox, who have been avidly denouncing Hamsher's campaign as "outrageous" and using it to paint Lieberman as a martyr of "the far left." Bill O'Reilly, among others, devoted a large chunk of last night's O'Reilly Factor, including his Talking Points Memo, to denouncing the campaign as "sickening" and "disgraceful."

The Giant Turnip of Wingnuttia, aka Glenn Beck, was particularly vicious. He devoted a whole segment to calling Hamsher out, holding up a reproduction of her infamous Lieberman "blackface" Photoshop from 2006 and repeatedly referring to it.

Having once worked for Jane, I can attest to the fact that she sincerely regrets having run that shot, and not just because it's constantly used to slap her down. But really, this is the kind of argumentation we've come to expect from Beck, a la his attacks on Van Jones and Anita Dunn: Latch onto a single rhetorical mistake, then play it over and over as though that's what the person is about.

Well, hey, that particular game is a two-way street. The only problem with Beck is that, as our Fearmonger in Chief, he gives us almost a daily example of complete asshattery that should in fact permanently discredit him. To wit:

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Where to start?

Oh what fun: Jon Stewart rips into Glenn Beck for his manifest lack of ethics in promoting gold as an investment on his program.

YahooNews's Brett Michael Dykes explained it in some detail:

For some time Beck critics have cried foul over his relationship with Goldline International, a precious metals vendor that features the TV and radio host's endorsement prominently on their website. Critics charge that Beck is guilty of misleading his audience by often advising them to purchase gold in advance of the potential collapse of the value of the dollar on the world currency market, without disclosing that he is in fact a "paid spokesman" for Goldline. Beck's on-air promotion of gold, which includes advising viewers to construct "fruit cellars" and to rely on a "three G system" of "God, Gold, and Guns" in the event of America's collapse, dates back to his time as a host for CNN Headline News.

Glenn Beck also regularly talks up gold on his nationally syndicated radio show, where he often endorses Goldline during live commercial segments. Additionally, Beck has had the company's CEO on as a guest. Advertisements for Goldline are also featured prominently on Beck's own website, where he recently promoted gold in an audio clip warning of an apocalyptic future:

When the system eventually collapses, and the government comes with guns and confiscates, you know, everything in your home and all your possessions, and then you fight off the raving mad cannibalistic crowds that Ted Turner talked about, don't come crying to me. I told you: get gold.

And as James Rainey explained at the LA Times, he may be leading a lot of people down a financial garden path:

Beck, true to form, has not been subtle in making his pitch. He has appealed to listeners to "think like a German Jew" during the period of Nazi ascendance. "I think people are running out of options," he said, "of something that could be worth something at all."

The alternative? Gold. Beck touts his personal investments in the metal and, though he has offered cautionary notes, he leaves no doubt about his bottom line.

"If you have been watching for any length of time and you still haven't looked into buying gold, what's wrong with you?" Beck asks on a video on his personal website. Those not following his advice, he adds, are "nuts."

Buying gold during economic hard times is not, to be sure, a new concept. In the current recession, it's a strategy that has been embraced by many mainstream investors.

My colleague Tom Petruno has written of how some economic wizards -- including David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital, predictor of last year's financial swoon -- have replaced some of the cash in their portfolios with gold.

But even some of those who have been making lots of money selling gold concede that the appeal goes beyond mere reason. Peter Epstein, president of Merit Financial Services, told Politico that his firm had advertised on CNN but that the gold message resonated more with Fox's viewers "because it's the angry white man audience -- it's the conservative audience. . . . They are distrustful of the government, of the regime."

That sort of thinking might not lead to the soundest decisions, some gold professionals told me.

"When people buy into the fear and flock into one thing, it's only a matter of time before it turns," said Matt Zeman, a metals trader at Chicago-based LaSalle Futures Group. Indeed, since last week's high of $1,218, gold had dropped Tuesday to $1,143, Zeman noted, adding: "I think the wheels could really come off the gold bandwagon."

Actually, Beck is promoting Ron Paul's extremist brand of libertarianism by promoting the "gold standard." It's been a sucker play for the Far Far Right for many years, and now it's being promoted by a mainstream news entity.

Snail Mail:

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Glenn Beck seems to be increasingly rattled by having been designated by the ADL as the nation's "Fearmonger in Chief" -- though he continues, on his Fox News show at least, to avoid tackling his critics by name. (He's pushed back at the ADL on his radio show, but only briefly.)

Yesterday he went on his show and denounced the unnamed "they" who say he is encouraging violence with his extremist rhetoric (which would decidedly include us). Keying off his softball interview with Barbara Walters -- who never did bring up his serial falsehoods about Walters and her colleagues at The View, oddly enough -- Beck gets all worked up about the toughest point raised in the whole conversation:

Beck: Barbara Walters even played into this nonsense during her interview with me last night on her annual 'Fascinating People' show. Here it is:

[CLIP] Walters: Glenn Beck is somebody who incites people to violence --

Beck: Oh, I've heard a lot --

Walters: -- He is inflammatory, he makes us scared.

Beck: Yeah. People say Glenn Beck is someone who incites people to violence. Yeah, a lot of people are saying that, but what's the evidence?

She also mentioned that I called Barack Obama a fascist. I don't know -- I, I don't think so. Maybe -- I don't think so, I do realize that Media Matters and MoveOn.org now just got an extra grant from Soros and they're moving into hyper-scramble to find, you know, an example. But I don't know if I ever even called him a fascist. I know I've said 'fascistic tendencies' -- sure, the administration is going in this direction.

Actually, what Walters said was this:

Walters: OK, you have said the Obama administration is fascist.

And in fact, that is exactly what he has done -- on multiple occasions, but most notably back on April 1:

Beck: Like it or not, fascism is on the rise. And that doesn't mean the Adolf Hitler kind of fascism. It's fascism with a happy face. I'll explain the exact definition of fascism in a second, and it will boggle your mind.

--

Beck: I looked up the definition of fascism yesterday, and I want to break it down. The first part is: "Where socialism sought totalitarian control of a society’s economic processes through direct state operation of the means of production, fascism sought that control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners." Wouldn't you say this is what's happening with GM right now?

As we noted then, this even included a segment with a time-traveling dime:

How far out to lunch was Beck here? Well, one of the goofier moments in this whole charade came when Beck trotted out the back of an old American dime -- first minted, as Beck says, in 1916 -- which has a fasces, the fascist symbol, on its reverse side:

This is the famed "Mercury dime", which was designed by sculptor Adolph A. Weinman, who won a 1915 competition: "The reverse design, a fasces juxtaposed with an olive branch, was intended to symbolize America's readiness for war, combined with its desire for peace."

Now, the fasces has a long history of inclusion in various parts of American symbology besides just this dime. You can find it in the Oval Office, on National Guard Bureau insignia, on the American flag that flies in the U.S. House, in the Mace of the House of Representatives; on the seal of the U.S. Senate, on the Statue of Freedom atop the United States Capitol building, and on a frieze on the facade of the United States Supreme Court building. Fasces are incorporated into the Lincoln Memorial.

But then, fascism as a political movement was not born until 1919. So for sculptor Weinman to have intended the fasces on the Mercury dime to imply a "fascist" intent, he'd have had to have jumped in a time machine, traveled to the future, met Mussolini, and come back to 1915 with that nefarious design in his head. Somehow I doubt this.

Beck had made the charge even before then, in a February conversation with Laura Ingraham:

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I was flipping the channels last night and I came across an ad for one of those Barbara Walters "10 Most Fascinating People" specials, and this year she included Glenn Beck on her list.

What is ABC thinking? They only feed into his lunacy and make him go more insane by the minute. His nuttiness does hurt America. When did being a lunatic become interesting, Barbara? Sure, Bill O'Reilly is jealous, but who cares?

This is why our media are so screwed up. They take a far right-black helicopter extremist and tell Americans that he's interesting, No, he's dangerous. Just check out his role in Richard Poplawski's deadly outburst.

Shame on Barbara and shame on ABC.

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Glenn Beck makes Ed Schultz's Psycho Talk segment for this nonsense--Beck: We Should ‘Just Abolish Medicare’:

Yesterday, Senate Democrats working on health care reform reached a compromise on the public option that will create a network of nonprofit insurers and allow Americans between the ages of 55 and 64 to buy into Medicare. The right has hypocritically opposed a government-run public-option while simultaneously defending Medicare. On his radio show today, Fox News host Glenn Beck called Medicare what it is — a “government-run health care plan.”

Beck attacked the new compromise and proposed a simple solution of his own — “abolish Medicare”.

Continue reading...

Digby had this to say about it--Why Don't They All Get Jobs?:

You have to wonder if Beck is aware of the average age of his audience demographic? [...]

Update: Attatuk thinks it probably doesn't matter --- and he's probably right.

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Countdown's Worst Persons for Dec. 9, 2009 with winner David Wright. Runners up Glenn Beck and Fox & Friends producer Lauren Petterson.

No More Mister Nice Blog: Things that normal people are opposed to on principle, conservatives are opposed to only when they are happening to the "wrong people" or done for the "wrong reasons."

Washington's Blog: The woman who invented credit default swaps is one of the key architects of carbon derivatives, which would be at the very center of cap and trade

The Liberal OC: Stay classy, wingnut

Bitter Lawyer: The Profane, Pornographic, Anti-Glenn Beck World of Marc Randazza

his vorpal sword: Pearl Harbor Day + 68

OFF THE BEATEN PATH: BTC News, plain view, Petulant Rumblings, bastard.logic