Vote Conservative for Their Integrity : Shady Right-Wingers and Glenn Becks
As Beck attempts to turn the world inside out and upside down by claiming the mantle of a movement he probably would have opposed, and whose means he is too small even to begin to comprehend, Milbank lists some of Beck's greatest moments as a champion of civil rights.
* As a radio host, performed an on-air skit that mocked a stereotyped Asian accent, forcing his station to apologize.
* On CNN, while interviewing Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, demanded proof that Ellison isn't working with "our" enemies.
* Called President Obama a "racist" who has a "deep-seated hatred for white people."
* Claims Obama was elected because he isn't white.
* Claims Obama is moving us into slavery.
* Asserted that the president's very name is Un-American.
* Claims Obama seeks reparations from white America, to "settle old racial scores."
* Has claimed Obama is tied to or influenced by "radical black nationalism" and "Marxist black liberation theology" and the New Black Panther Party, which Beck claims is part of Obama's "army of thugs."
It would almost be funny if so many didn't take it seriously. And if their taking it seriously wasn't part of a deeply disturbing hidden agenda. As Frank Rich explained, last Sunday:
There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.
Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch’s, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy, they might.
All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president.
And Rich referred to the chillingly essential article on the Kochs, by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker.
As their fortunes grew, Charles and David Koch became the primary underwriters of hard-line libertarian politics in America. Charles’s goal, as Doherty described it, was to tear the government “out at the root.” The brothers’ first major public step came in 1979, when Charles persuaded David, then thirty-nine, to run for public office. They had become supporters of the Libertarian Party, and were backing its Presidential candidate, Ed Clark, who was running against Ronald Reagan from the right. Frustrated by the legal limits on campaign donations, they contrived to place David on the ticket, in the Vice-Presidential slot; upon becoming a candidate, he could lavish as much of his personal fortune as he wished on the campaign. The ticket’s slogan was “The Libertarian Party has only one source of funds: You.” In fact, its primary source of funds was David Koch, who spent more than two million dollars on the effort.
Many of the ideas propounded in the 1980 campaign presaged the Tea Party movement. Ed Clark told The Nation that libertarians were getting ready to stage “a very big tea party,” because people were “sick to death” of taxes. The Libertarian Party platform called for the abolition of the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., as well as of federal regulatory agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Energy. The Party wanted to end Social Security, minimum-wage laws, gun control, and all personal and corporate income taxes; it proposed the legalization of prostitution, recreational drugs, and suicide. Government should be reduced to only one function: the protection of individual rights. William F. Buckley, Jr., a more traditional conservative, called the movement “Anarcho-Totalitarianism.”
The complete article is at the link. Whatever viral strain of conservatism one studies - it all comes up with the same appeals to eliminationism, a contempt for working class Americans, the desire for a permanent underclass that shops at Wal-Martish stores for products made in China and a dangerous disregard fro the environment and personal freedom.
