A Treated Symptom

The flip side to reporter Michael Aron and news anchor Jim Hooker losing their jobs at NJN in a real-life imitation of the last episode of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" is the fact that Glenn Beck signed off at Fox News for the long-awaited last time on the same day, June 30. (Like Aron and Hooker, Beck didn't get to finish the week. But no one could take one more day of Beck. I couldn't even take one more minute.)

Beck's departure was due to the fact that liberal activist groups banded together against his racist, McCarthyistic, ultra-paranoid banter and got over three hundred advertisers to drop him. He proved to be too much of a financial liability to Fox News to stay on the air.

Beck was a symptom, though. The disease goes merrily on. Sean Hannity, the noted Long Island Irish Nazi, will continue to denigrate liberals and question their patriotism, while rhymes-with-glass-poles like Eric Bolling go on dismissing President Obama in racial terms. Though, to be fair, I haven't heard anyone on Fox call Obama a dick yet, as happened on MSNBC when Mark Halperin assessed the President's performance in his most recent news conference (more on that later).

No matter. Because as long as Fox News is on the air, it will remain a broadcaster of hate and divisiveness, and a voice for the rich and powerful.

We have to keep calling them out. Jon Stewart is only one man. He can't do it alone.

Beck-Ola

Fox News made a lot of liberals happy for a change this week. The so-called "fair and balanced news" channel announced that Glenn Beck's show, on at 5 PM Eastern, will end later this year.

I'm not happy. I'm very upset . . . about having to wait so long before it ends!

The Beckster, as Ed Schultz likes to call him, has the third highest-rated show on cable news, but Beck's ratings have been plummeting recently as Beck himself has gotten weirder. He's suggested, among other things, that both George Walker Bush and Barack Obama have been helping to bring about a new pan-Islamic caliphate in the Middle East by refusing to bomb the ruins of ancient Babylon during the Iraq War. Seems Beck thinks the caliphate's capital is to be established there.

Some of Beck's recent theories of world domination by enemies of America sound like they came right out of James Bond movies or Saturday morning television cartoons, but Beck has been under protest from liberal activists virtually since his Fox show began in January 2009. Remember that Beck - on another Fox show - declared in July of that year that President Obama had a "deep-seated hatred for white people," and in August 2010 Beck famously told people who were dropped from unemployment benefits after 99 weeks to work at McDonald's if they had to, even though the fast-food chain had more job applicants than jobs. His Austin Powers-redolent world government theories were only part of his problem.

Anyway, enough advertisers pulled their TV commercials from the Beckster's show to encourage Fox to drop him, although Beck and the network will (reportedly) continue to work together to develop new programming. Beck is going behind the scenes, where he likely won't be heard from again, and he's treating this career change like a promotion.

It's a Pyrrhic victory in one respect. Beck goes against noted MSNBC wild man Chris Matthews, who answers Beck's wild theories on a regular basis, in the same 5 PM Eastern time slot, and even today he trounces Matthews's "Hardball" show in the ratings. So even as Matthews rants against Beck, Beck still gets more viewers. I suppose more people found out the truth about Beck by seeing the rerun of "Hardball" at 7 PM Eastern, or maybe people suddenly started to find Beck moronic on their own and stopped watching. But mostly, it was likely the petitioning against Beck's advertisers that did him in. That's the same reason Beck's radio show has been dropped from so many stations.

Beck's impending departure from Fox and his diminished presence on radio comprise a blow against the right's toxic gibberish, and Dana Milbank of the Washington Post suggests that Beck's raging paranoia against the system is less of a factor in the body politic now that the economy is slowly recovering. However, the campaign against Beck only treated a symptom. The disease, in the form of Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, and that Long Island Irish Nazi Sean Hannity - all of whom can be as loony as Beck and also are just as mean-spirited - goes merrily on. Right-wing talk shows will never die. Remember, this is America.

Beck Outfoxed

Late word is that Fox News will not, in fact, air Glenn Beck's Lincoln Memorial rally live tomorrow, and is instead planning to cover it briefly as a "news event." Well, it's nice to see that Fox has some integrity. I only wish they'd discovered fairness and balance before its parent company donated money to the Republican Governors' Association.

Bad, bad, very bad. . . .

I Have a Nightmare

Noted schizophrenic egocentric paranoiac prima donna Glenn Beck has parlayed his success at Fox News into a lucrative reality TV special, which is what his "Restoring Honor" rally at the Lincoln Memorial this coming Saturday actually is. The rally, Beck explains, is meant to bring honor and dignity back to the civil rights movement and "reclaim" Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream. What? Reclaim it from what? From whom? And when did the civil rights movement ever lose its honor? When King spoke out against the war in Vietnam? When George McGovern was nominated for President? When Al Sharpton appointed himself as a family advisor to too many victims of racism at one time and couldn't manage his overloaded schedule?

Beck's interpretation of civil rights is a scary libertarianism in which people live for and care about themselves rather than for each other. Now, if I were asked to define civil rights, I couldn't recite the Webster's definition verbatim, but I know that grievances on Beck's agenda are not part of civil rights. Civil rights are essentially the rights to be a part of the community; the selfish individualism Beck espouses has nothing to do with that.

Guns, incidentally, are a part of Beck's agenda. Beck apparently plans to make Second Amendment rights a focal point of his rally, a point of fact underscored by the appearance of Sarah Palin and her known use of firearms metaphors. What do you expect from the woman who brought you aerial animal shooting? And by the way, isn't it in bad taste to talk about guns when talking about "reclaiming" the dream of a man who was shot to death?

Beck and Palin were both four years old (they were born a day apart in February 1964 - coincidence or supernatural phenomenon?) when Dr. King was assassinated, so they have no direct memory of the civil rights movement in its salad days. Which would be fine if they hadn't fallen asleep in high school history class back in the eighties when they were being taught about it.

If there's any good news about Beck's rally (and I'm stretching it here), it's that most residents of Washington, D.C., the majority of whom are black, won't be affected by it because organizers have distributed a map of the District showing in red the part where it's considered "unsafe" for these macho suburban white guys to travel through (i.e., most of it). Still, what's left (shown in blue) is the most recognizable and more tourist-friendly area of the District, and Beck is guaranteed a good deal of TV coverage by TV news outlets other than his own Fox News. Meanwhile, Al Sharpton is holding a counter-rally at a Washington high school at which Ed Schultz will appear. A high school? Bad PR mistake. I'm sure a lot of Americans, even in this age of ignorance, can still find the Lincoln Memorial on a Washington, D.C. map. But how many of them can find Dunbar High School?

Beck's rally at the Lincoln Memorial, by the way, is taking place forty-seven years to the day after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech on the same spot at the civil rights march on Washington. Because August 28 is a Saturday this year, Beck can count on a large gathering for his own rally. But would he be getting many participants, or so much attention from the media, if he were still holding the rally on the civil rights march anniversary and August 28 fell on a Wednesday this year, as it did when the march on Washington took place in 1963? Doubtful. Beck's fans wouldn't take a Wednesday off to attend a rally when they have jobs to hold onto in a recession.

And we all know what Beck and his fans think of the long-term unemployed.

Pains In the Neck

Rush Limbaugh revealed the depth of his compassion for the unemployed. Speaking with and unemployed 49-year-old male caller about the severity of the man's employment situation, Limbaugh was so touched by his story - after he learned that he didn't vote for Obama - that he gave him information for getting a free massage from one of Limbaugh's sponsors to relieve his stress.

I would have preferred a fruit basket. At least then I'd have something to eat.

Meanwhile, someone suggested to Sarah Palin that Glenn Beck should be her vice presidential running mate if she is nominated to run for President in 2012. Palin praised Beck in response.

This story has given me something no masseur can relieve. :-O

"Ima Let You Finish"

I don't normally care for or about the MTV Music Video Awards, which is really the musical equivalent of the Clios. That is, promotional music videos are commercials. But even a musical curmudgeon like myself would have to feel compelled to comment on Kanye West's interruption of country singer Taylor Swift's acceptance speech for her award at the MTV shindig this past Sunday. West ruined what should have been a wonderful experience for Taylor Swift by interrupting her acceptance speech to declare his opinion that Beyoncé Knowles should have won that same award. Knowles herself expressed a look that was a combination of surprise and bewilderment, looking like she was laughing at West more than with him.

I don't profess to know what prompted West to pull such a stunt. After all, Taylor Swift winning an award instead of Beyoncé Knowles is not like poor people in New Orleans losing their homes to flooding. West was right to call out George Walker Bush four years ago, but expressing displeasure over an award recipient in the same manner was neither justified nor called for.

Knowles, to her credit, had Swift share the stage with her later in the ceremony, and even President Obama weighed in calling him a "jackass," which many found offensive. (So did I; he should have dropped the "jack.")

If you really wanted to find jackasses this past weekend, you only needed to look at Washington, where sixty thousand of them - although Glenn Beck insists there were over a million of them - demonstrated against Obama's health care reform proposals, virulently denouncing him as a fascist and accusing him of spending too much money and letting the government take over health care. Many of the signs and slogans were vicious and nasty, making clear references to Obama's race and national origin, continuously claiming he was born in Kenya. This is the culmination of numerous town hall meetings and public speeches (some of them Obama's) in which people carried guns.

This is all pretty unsettling. Because just as it was implied that Kayne West found it objectionable that a country and western singer would beat out a hip-hop/R&B diva for an award (Kanye West doesn't care about white people?), it's more than implied that these protesters really don't like the idea of a black man in the White House.

Kanye West is a clown. But these tea-party conservatives, egged on by folks like schizophrenic, egocentric paranoiac prima donna Glenn Beck are downright scary.