Glenn Beck: Schizoid, or Just Principle-Free?

By Kevin Tillman, AlterNet. Posted September 22, 2009.

Glenn Beck's 9/12 project is a cornerstone of the tea-bagging movement that's defined the warm months of 2009 as the Summer of Hate. He rails against big gummint, the loss of our "freedoms", and, natch, holds up all the bailouts and stimulus plans as proof of our inexorable slow slide into -- your pick -- socialism or fascism. In July, he railed (accurately for once) about how Wall Street "owns our government", drawing charts showing the revolving doors between Goldman Sachs and Treasury.

Given that much of the action Wall Street has tasted began under Bush -- TARP was the Bushies' baby -- one might give beck some credit for acting on principle rather than out of partisanship.

Or maybe not so much. Here's Beck's view of the bailout during the last months of the Bush administration, before he jumped from CNN to his natural habitat at Fox [Via Jenkins' Ear]:

I thought about it an awful lot this weekend, and while it takes everything in me to say this, I think the bailout is the right thing do.

The "REAL STORY" is the $700 billion that you`re hearing about now is not only, I believe, necessary, it is also not nearly enough, and all of the weasels in Washington know it.

You think about this crisis again like an airplane, ok. We could have stopped this whole thing when the plane was sitting at the gate and we were saying don`t load this thing up with easy money and make mansions for anybody who wants them. You can`t take off in this plane.

[...]

Well, now we`re stuck in a position where we let that plane fall out of the sky or we do our best to try to have some sort of a controlled crash landing that saves lives and let us salvage what we can. I mean, there are 350 million people on this plane.

He never supported the stimulus, which actually helped some ordinary folks among those 350 million rather than primarily bailing out the investor class, but of course that didn't happen on a Republican's watch. And this is right-wing faux populism, and should be understood in that context.

In other news from Bizarro World, Beck says McCain would have been worse than the Angry-Black-Dude-In-Chief. Go figure.

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