Glenn Beck Debases, Dishonors and Disgraces MLK’s Dream

Still unable to accept the outcome of an election not decided by the right-wing Supreme Court, tens of thousands disgruntled white people gathered on the very spot where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech 47 years ago to decry the African American President that normal people legally elected to clean up the abhorrent aftermath of 30 years of class warfare Reaganomics and 8 years of disastrous Bush policies.

Beck, a incredibly-wealthy huckster told Forbes magazine that he could “give a flying crap about the political process”, but is only in it for the money, and who uses his Rupert Murdoch and Saudi Prince Alwaleed-owned Fox News show not only to convince his willfully ignorant audience into losing their money by “investing” in a gold coin company currently under investigation, but also to espouse an ideology meant to cultivate divisions in this nation – lest people turn their anger on the big moneyed interests that Beck convinces his dupes to loudly rally to support.

Bussed to Beck’s Restoring Honor ™ rally courtesy of billionaire climate denier right-wing billionaire David A. Koch of the oil giant Koch Industries, the so-called “non political” event steeped-in politics attendees were praised by half-term governor opportunist Sarah Palin, praised “patriots” in the audience for “knowing never to retreat”… from… I guess… the legally-elected black guy in the White House… and directed to join FreedomWorks, the Astroturf funding arm of the Teabaggers run by former representative Dick Armey, who holds the notable opinion the government-run socialist healthcare known as Medicare- that many of the Teabaggers currently enjoy without a sense of irony – “trashes the Constitution.”

Of course, Republicans traditionally become born-again Constitutionalists during Democratic administrations when it seems like their true constituents – big-moneyed interests and their transnational corporations – may have to loosen their grip around the neck of working people if “pesky” government gets in the way.  This is nothing new.

Beck, who has ensured that racial wounds remain wide open so that our economic royalist masters can drive a wedge between the people who they seek to control, has called the first African-American President a “racist with a deep seeded hatred against white people” as well as railed against the very philosophy of “social justice” that Martin Luther King devoted his life to.

The People For the American Way released a statement about Beck’s bastardization of MLK’s dream here:

Glenn Beck and Dr. King

Michael B. Keegan, President of People For the American Way, released the following statement about Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally in DC this weekend:

“Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech was one of America’s proudest moments, and helped define the core values of a nation. Dr. King’s speech was a powerful call for tolerance, compassion, and unity in a harshly divided country. On that day in August of 1963, his March on Washington gathered hundreds of thousands of Americans devoted to expanding equality and opportunity.

“Forty-seven years later, Glenn Beck is trying to appropriate Dr. King’s legacy in order to push his agenda of intolerance, fear, and division. Beck says he’s ‘reclaiming civil rights.’ In fact, he’s insulting exactly what Dr. King and his movement stood for.  Beck has made himself famous for his attacks on progressives, Muslim Americans, union members and even churches who preach the social justice values to which Dr. King dedicated his life.  He claimed that President Obama has ‘a deep-seated hatred of white people.’  Beck is not ‘restoring honor’ to our country; he’s just fanning the flames of tired old prejudices amplified and enlarged for political gain.

“Beck’s histrionics and his deeply cynical appeals to bigotry are anathema to Dr. King’s legacy.  In honoring the life work of Dr. King, Americans should stand for justice and equality for all people, and against hate and those who speak, teach and promote it.”

Robert Greenwald invites us all to “stand with Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of a just, diverse and equal society. I do not stand with Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin and their attempt to destroy and distort King’s vision.” Go to Greenwald’s site “Glenn Beck is not Martin Luther King Jr. to sign the statement.

Only a Republican could be quoted saying that peace talks are the biggest threats to peace and be taken seriously, just like when Bush schooled we ignorant Plebs on June 18, 2002 saying, “I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we’re really talking about peace.” on Christiane Amanpour’s Sunday show George Will told the American People that “…the peace process is the biggest threat to peace in Palestine.”

This comes on the heals of the announced this week from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that there will be new peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians, so the real problem for Republicans is not how they can effectively aid in the peace process, but how they can stop progress in order to deny a Democratic administration any victories while in office. Of course, the unprecedented Republican obstructionism on all fronts proves once again that Republicans care nothing for country or community – only to the profit of their benefactors – transnational corporations whose only goal is to ride the working people of this nation to the bank without pesky government interference. If they can stop Hillary Clinton from positively affecting peace in the Middle East, they improve their chances of convincing the willfully ignorant of this nation to put them back in power so they can continue turning them into compliant serfs.

As if normal people weren’t already convinced that the Republican Party is a nest of morally-bankrupt, greed centered oligarchs (and their willfully-ignorant sycophants who adopt the agenda of billionaires in the hopes said billionaires will one day meet them for a beer), we have more proof that Republicans would be quite content having millions die in perpetual war in order to maintain their own power.

Republicans are sick… sick… sick… and the most tragic part is that their ideology is like a virus that sickens us all.

Read more at Crooks and Liars

Never one to miss an opportunity for media exposure – especially when it comes with the added benefit of activating the racist Republican base that still can’t forgive the normal people of America for voting a black man into the highest office in the land, – one-time, half-term Governor of Alaska and professional Twitter updater, Sarah Palin defended Dr Laura’s episode of “N-Word” Tourette’s syndrome by misguidedly equating Dr. Laura’s quitting her radio show with an assault on her Constitutional right to rant like the racist she is.

Listen to Dr. Laura’s rant here:

Although supposedly remorseful about her insensitivity,  Dr. Laura said she felt her freedom of speech rights “have been usurped by angry, hateful groups who don’t want to debate — they want to eliminate.”  So… in other words… in true right-wing fashion, Dr. Laura blamed the targeted minority group for not quietly accepting her verbal whipping, rather than take responsibility for her hateful and insensitive use of the most hatefully-charged racial epitaph in the English language.

Only in Teabagger-infested America can a barely literate moron who squeaked out of journalism school after bouncing around to SIX different colleges has the arrogance to fancy herself a Constitutional scholar be taken seriously by right-wing sycophants is coming to the defense of a notoriously insensitive doctor of PHYSIOLOGY who let her mother’s corpse rot for MONTHS while playing armchair quack psychologist to those self-loathing enough to seek her advise.

Given the context of Dr. Laura’s departure,  Palin tweeted – without a speck of irony – “”Dr. Laura=even more powerful & effective w/out the shackles, so watch out Constitutional obstructionists. And b thankful 4 her voice, America!”

Amazing.

Not unexpectedly, The Republican Party’s propaganda channel Fox News chose not to cover the incident at all.

Read Ronda Racha Penrice great editorial from the Grio. here.

Watch Stephen Colbert’s take on Dr. Laura’s rant:

While Economic Royalists, their Republican and DINO operatives in government and their corporate-cover propaganda outlets, fan racist flames to keep the people divided against themselves, some in media are finally starting to talk about the class war Republicans have been waging against working people since Reaganomics inflicted it’s supply-side, trickle-down, disaster on a once-vibrant middle class.

Shirley Sherrod gave voice to it when she noted in her speech to the NAACP that the conversation the nation needs to have was not about “black versus white” or “white versus black” but “rich versus poor.”

The Republican response to the utterance of this truth was to take her speech calling for unity among working people and heavily edit it to ensure racism maintains it’s fresh, painful and divisive utility.  An actual, mature, conversation about class and race in America is considered blasphemy in world where wedge issues are vital to keeping people angry, distracted and misinformed enough to vote for their own demise.

Simply put, Republicans care only for their wealthy benefactors who sent them to Washington to make government, as FDR said, “an appendage to their own affairs,” ensuring that they can continue to ride your back to the bank without the “pesky” interference from the only institution powerful enough to slow them down – our Constitutionally-limited, democratically-elected, representative government of “We The People.”

If you listen to FDR’s speech in 1936, it’s clear that we are fighting the same forces of “organized money.”  Unfortunately, at the moment, they are winning.

Read the transcript of the speech here.

The fact is that 30 years of Reaganomics have made America the LEAST upwardly mobile of all the industrialized nations, given us the widest gap between rich and poor since the first Republican Great Depression and turned the middle class into overworked, underpaid, compliant Serfs who have to work 3 “uniquely American” jobs to not even come close to the same standard of living of the “Greatest Generation.”  Even Reagan’s Budget Policy Director, David Stockman, admits that Reaganomics destroyed the American economy – saying the Republican party’s “new policy doctrines have caused four great deformations of the national economy, and modern Republicans have turned a blind eye to each one.”

That’s right out of the Republican Dirty Trick playbook  -  pillage what you are meant to protect and then blame the villagers.   The Republicans have no ideas to change our economy for the better because they have no desire to change what, for them, it is working just fine.   If only the “small people” would just accept their new Serf status instead of longing for a living wage!

It was heartening to hear Keith Olbermann talk about it.  Check out his segment on the Republican class war and their filthy attacks on the unemployed their policies created:

In the face of the Wikileaks documents exposing the futility of our murderous, un-winnable, adventures in Afghanistan, Congress approved ANOTHER deficit-ballooning war supplemental while nixing deficit-neutral funds to prevent the layoffs of approximately140,000 teachers.  Proving, once again, that the “deficit hawk”, “we must cut spending” meme only gets trotted out when Republicans are further turning the screws on the Middle Class their policies are actively meant to destroy.

A House aide said that the teacher money is a top priority for Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and House Appropriations Committee Chairman David R. Obey, D-Wis… but apparently not as important as pouring unlimited resources into Afghanistan – historically unconquerable since Genghis Kahn.

The final bill contained 37 Billion for a war that, according to the leaked Pentagon internal documents, is destroying our economy and making us less safe.

The bill also cut $10 billion in funding to prevent teacher layoffs, $1 billion for summer youth employment, $5 billion for Pell grants and $701 million for border security, all of which were offset and budget-neutral, whereas the war funding actually increases the national debt.

Here we are again.   Fake Republicans and Democrat in Name only, so-called “deficit hawks” who only seem to appear when the late, great, American Middle Class needs relief from the disastrous effects of 30 years of Reaganomics.

The majority of Americans now oppose the war, yet those who are sent to Washington to supposedly represent us, insist on continuing it.

This is a failure of our democracy the same way war is a failure of leadership.   Unfortunately for us, war is also quite profitable for the rich benefactors who keep our so-called representatives well greased in Washington.

Our system is broken and corrupted by money.  Period.  We were warned, though.

Eisenhower warned us of the dangers of the “Military-Industrial Complex”, and our 4^th President James Madison wrote,

“Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes and the opportunities of fraud growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could reserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

Two time Medal of Honor winner, General Smedley Butler wrote in War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America’s Most Decorated Soldier

“A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?

Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few – the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.

And what is this bill?

This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.”

It’s been reported that, like the billions of dollars missing in Iraqm, billions are missing in Afghanistan – billions of dollars in OUR MONEY that was shipped on pallets and in giant suitcases and is now, most likely, sitting in the Swiss Bank accounts of Afgan drug—lords.

could going to create jobs in the US, send kids to college, revitalize our crumbing infrastructure or put us on the road to energy independence.

The fact is, even the Pentagon has reported that there are less than 100 Al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan. It’s also been reported that we’ve been aware that it holds vast mineral riches for the taking of any once-vibrant democracy turned oligarchy willing to turn its youth into, as General Butler described, “high class thug(s) for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers.”

This is the world we are creating for future generations.  With education available to only the rich, there’s sure to be no shortage of “paupers” willing to be, as Thomas Jefferson wrote, “shot at for a shilling a day.” Of course, the tragedy is that he was bragging to his friend Dr. Thomas Cooper,

“our men are so happy at home that they will not hire themselves to be shot at for a shilling a day. Hence we can have no standing armies for defense, because we have no paupers to furnish the materials.”

I’m afraid that our Founders, as well as many of our predecessors, would be sorely saddened by the fact that we did not heed their warnings and turned the government of “We the People” they passed down into just another sad, dying, empire, functioning to keep the rich in the cat-bird seats of power, looking down at a large pool of cheap labor to exploit and send to war.

This is Post-“American Dream” America – where so few do so much damage to so many… and Republican and DINO leaders respond with, “so what?”

In the heat of the class war Republicans are actively waging against the working people of this nation, the American People are in desperate need of a bold and unapologetic populist leader in the style of FDR- not a Neville Chamberlain-style appeaser appealing to the enemy for restraint and mercy through constant capitulation.

Yet Barack Obama has done it again.  In another vain attempt to get Republicans to work with him like some “Team of Rivals” fantasy, the Administration immediately threw Shirley Sherrod under the bus, rather than defend her against egregious lies and heavily-edited hit piece courtesy of Andrew Breitbart, Glenn Beck and Fox News.

This is not the first time.   The first target sacrificial lamb thrown to the voracious right wing wolves was Van Jones, whom the Obama Administration let go as soon as Glenn Beck started licking his chops.

The next target was an organization among the infrastructure of empowerment for the poor and under represented – ACORN.   To this day, ACORN remains defunded even though exonerated by New York City Prosecutors, the California Attorney General, and the Government Accountability Office. In spite of running on a perpetual loop on Corporate America’s propaganda outlet, Fox “News”, the James O’Keefe hit piece was not “explosive journalism” revealing a sinister conspiracy to smuggle underage prostitutes into the US – but a selectively edited hack-job designed to hobble an organization giving the poor a voice in the voting process.

But that’s what Fox “News” – and their right-wing compatriots do. Their entire reason for being is to foment racism and fear.

The Republican agenda boils down to this: Make the rich richer and turn the rest of us into compliant serfs. In order to do that, they must foment divisions between the 90% of the population that their policies are designed to burden and control.

So they divide us by race, divide us by sexual orientation, and divide us by religion – all smoke screens to keep their followers ignorant, angry and distracted while they ride them (and us) all the way to the bank.

Watch Keith Olbermann tell President Obama to stop enabling the right wing freaks destroying our nation:

… so they cut them out of the conversation.

Big Oil wins again – with the help of their Republican operatives in our government. Republicans just robbed the Floridian community (they are supposed to represent) of the opportunity to protect their environment and their economy from the dangers of corporate-sponsored ecocide by blocking the attempt to get a Constitutional ban on offshore drilling before voters in the November 2 general election.

The actions of the Florida Legislature is evidence of the fact that the only reason Republican politicians get out of bed in the morning is to ensure that our wealthy overlords – transnational corporations who have no allegiance to country or community – can continue to ride the American People to the bank unfettered by the pesky government.

A poll released Monday by Progress Florida showed that 71 percent of Florida voters wanted the chance to vote on adding an oil drilling ban to the Florida state Constitution, with 50 percent of Floridians opposing drilling within 10 miles of Florida’s coast. Republicans, knowing that Big Oil’s odds for victory was slim, set out to ensure the Floridian Community will never get the chance to protect their shores over big-oil profits.

With Florida tourism depending on beautiful beaches, fishing and swimming in unspoiled waters, the Republican corporate operatives were uncomfortable with the voter’s shifting attitude favoring a ban since the BP disaster, so they worked to ensure that the voters will never get the chance to create an economy and a community that works for all – not just rich transnational corporations.

With Big Oil pleased, Republican lawmakers will no doubt be richly rewarded for their efforts.
Read more here.

The schizophrenia of being a modern conservative is enough to give normal people sharing the same air a perpetual knotted stomach. For example, the conservative penchant for proclaiming Jesus as their favorite “philosopher” while re-writing the story of the original liberal “community organizer” into some free-market capitalist crusader Hell-bent on teaching the lazy poor people to pull themselves up from their bootstraps.

The hypocrisy of today’s Cons turning the “Prince of Peace” into a vindictive, war-mongering, selfish, greed-centered, version of themselves is illustrated beautifully at Tea Party Jesus – where the literal words of today’s Christians are put in the mouth of Christ as evidence to the unbridled dishonesty and disingenuousness of Con philosophy.

Canadian-American economist, prolific author and proud progressive John Kenneth Galbraith put it correctly when he said,

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

Not only are they in desperate need of moral justification, they are in on a constant mission for historical justification – even if that means they have to simply “make it up.”

The arch of history in positively evolving societies bends away from Con ideology and towards enlightened and vibrant democracy.
Our Founders, students of the liberal Enlightenment – the Age of Reason – were fighting the Con ideology when they created our republic. Although their were some foundered more Conservative than others – ones who believed that the “right” people (the rich) should lead and the rest of us should follow, they were fresh from being under the thumb of hundreds of years of generational aristocracies and hereditary rule. The Cons of their day were the Loyalists who wanted to remain under the thumb of the Monarchy.

Unfortunately for the current state of discourse in America, wearing a 3-pointed hat draped with teabags does not a historian make.

Glenn Beck is the most egregious culprit in attempting to rewrite history to suit his malignant narcissism.

Not only does Glenn Beck suffer from alcoholism, drug addiction and suicide ideation, and – as Lewis Black put it – “Nazi Tourettes” – he also suffers from regular breaks from reality.

Funny how someone so adept in sniffing out the scent of Nazism would revive that old Nazi propaganda, anti-Semitic canard, about the Jews killing his Lord and Savior, Jesus H Christ, Beck went on his radio program to attack Jewish Funds for Justice’s Simon Greer; saying putting “the common good” first “leads to death camps.”

For the sake of setting the record straight, let’s hear what our actual Founding Fathers had to say about “the common good.”

“In contriving any system of government, and fixing the several checks and controls of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no other end, in all his actions, but private interest. By this interest we must govern him, and by means of it make him co-operate to public good,” Alexander Hamilton “The Farmer Refuted.“

“The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust.” – James Madison from “Federalist No. 57“

“Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity and happiness of the people; and not for the profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men: Therefore the people alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government; and to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their protection, safety, prosperity and happiness require it.” – John Adams “Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1780) Article VII“

“During the contest of opinion through which we have past, the animation of discussions and of exertions has sometimes worn an aspect which might impose on strangers unused to think freely, and to speak and to write what they think; but this being now decided by the voice of the nation, announced according to the rules of the constitution all will of course arrange themselves under the will of the law, and unite in common efforts for the common good.” – Thomas Jefferson “First Inaugural Address“

Thanks Thom Hartmann for putting these quotes together.

Barack Obama’s Facebook page announced, “We’re going to keep on fighting until wages and incomes are rising, businesses are hiring again, Americans are headed back to work again, and we’ve recovered from this recession.”

Sound’s wonderful, but I’m done with promises… promises…. like most normal (non-Republican) Americans, I’m numb from promises and looking for ACTION.

The gap between the rich and poor is the widest in decades. Well-fed Republican bastards are, AS USUAL, fighting for tax cuts for the rich – although it would add to the deficit they suddenly care so much about – while simultaneously blocking the extension of unemployment benefits for those out of work in the worst economic climate since the FIRST Republican Great Depression.  Their reasoning is simple – the more people unemployed at election time, the better their chances of getting their boney fingers around the neck of power again. THAT’S how much Republicans hate the “small people” of this nation.

But, still, rather than boldly and unapologetically embracing Democratic Party values and policies, our duly-elected President woos the greed-centered Republicans no matter how many times they reveal this disdain for the suffering of the late, great, American Middle Class.

How about we reach back into the past of and emulate a successful DEMOCRAT whose policies CREATED the once-vibrant American Middle Class – FDR – and restart the Civilian Conservation Corps?   Stimulate the economy in a way that works – from the BOTTOM up, put millions of unemployed people back to work, clean up the corporate-sponsored environmental disasters, put us on the road to energy independence and instill a sense of pride in a despondent workforce.

Why does government always bailout the elite and let the Plebs eat cake?   Where is the Candidate Obama I voted for?   He has surrounded himself with corporatist ideologues who want to maintain the power of our “too big to fail” masters and appease Republicans like battered spouses pining for their abusers.  They won’t take bold action like FDR did because they are just as wedded to the corporate money as Republicans are.  THAT’S how corrupted by money our government is.  This is why we can’t get real “change we can believe in,” only watered-down compromises that they can tout as “victories” for the people too exhausted from their 3 “Uniquely American” low-paying, dead-end, jobs to pay attention.  The root causes of the giant problems unbridled greed and the war on the middle class have brought us are still in place.   Geithner, Summers, Emanuel… are so careful not to anger government’s true constituents – the big moneyed interests that don’t care a whit about the “small people” – that real “change” that would restore the power of the middle class, bring our jobs home from China and India and restart American Manufacturing is impossible.

Want to see the future for the American worker?  Take a look at powerless Chinese worker.  That’s what they are slowing doing to us here.

“The world is flat” if you are a corporate bankster with no allegiance to country or community.

This war on the middle class all began with Reagan. Why doesn’t the President talk about that?  All we hear from Republicans are “the Obama recession… Obama, Reid Pelosi Bailout…”  The party of “Personal Responsibility” sure knows how to take no responsibility for their messes!    But, you see, this destruction of the middle class is what Republican policies are designed to DO.   Their goal is to have the rich own and run everything and the rest of us are turned into compliant Serfs fighting for the scraps that “trickle down” off their tables.  Thanks to Republican policies, the United States is the LEAST upwardly mobile of all the industrialized nations.

Knowing that most American have the political memory of a fruit fly, the President should get on TV  – like he did with his final half hour ad from the campaign titled “American Stories, American Solutions” – and tell the story about how Republican policies have destroyed the middle class with their selfish obsession to shift the tax burden to the shoulders of working people and ship our jobs to China.  (yes, I know that Clinton signed NAFTA – that’s why I said, Republican “policies.”)

That won’t happen, though, because we can’t even have a mature conversation in this country – instead we get speeches about how we put a man on the moon (in a time when the top marginal tax rate was 77% BTW) and “let us pray.”

FDR used to say, “I welcome their hatred.”  This President lauds about “bipartisanship” and welcomes “ideas” from the very dead-enders we voted against who are turning “The Land of the Free” into “The United States of Serfs and Lords.”

We didn’t vote for “Republican ideas.”  We voted to reverse the “Republican Ideas” that have given us the greatest income disparity between rich and poor since the Gilded Age (ANOTHER time of “Republican Ideas”… btw)

I’m so tired of watching this country be devoured by greed.  Join our Green CCC FB page… if you are so inclined….

And check out Daniel Cluchey article at the Huffington Post: Hoover v. Roosevelt: Decision 2010