Fox’s Megyn Kelly once again helped Glenn Beck with his image rehab from extremist hate monger to centrist uniter. Just like Beck, Kelly “forgot” his history of race baiting, fear mongering and smearing. Instead, she looked thoughtfully receptive as Beck recast himself into something any sane person should know he is not. Even as the cracks in his new persona were already showing.
As I wrote a few months ago about Beck’s image makeover, it just so happens to coincide with his marketing campaign to get his network added to cable lineups across the country.
Clearly, Fox is on board to help with the makeover part. In addition to his softball interview on The Kelly File in January, Beck has spent some quality palsy time on the Hannity show, too. FoxNews.com did its part by subtitling the video of this segment, “Radio show host on why America has to come together.”
Beck told Kelly:
First of all…. progressives, liberals, whoever on the other side: I will admit I was wrong about the war in Iraq. I really thought we could bring peace and justice and freedom and all of that stuff. You didn’t. You were right. …You are never going to bring freedom there. You’re never going to do it. They have to want it themselves.
Notice something missing? Like an apology or remorse for playing a part in ginning up approval for the disastrous invasion?
Beck also hasn’t dropped the fear mongering or hate. He said about Iraq early in the segment, “I see much more than a caliphate coming our way… If, God forbid, Iraq is lost… and is a caliphate, you’re gonna see a civil war (throughout) the Middle East.” Also, Beck threw out that there’s “a bias towards the Muslim Brotherhood” in the U.S. media.
When asked why, if he sees such awful things ahead in Iraq, we should not go back in and try to avert catastrophe, he let forth with this phony-baloney pretense of sensitivity:
We’re not the country we were five, ten years ago. We are depleted, we’re war weary, it’s not gonna happen. We need to pull back. Get back into our own country and strengthen ourselves. Look what’s happening internally! Look what’s happening to us!
First of all, a very scary set of data points are coming in. And that is, the American people – left, right, center, doesn’t matter. Forget about politics. They don’t feel like anybody’s listening to them any more. They’re working harder and bringing home less. The price of …meat, milk, cheese: all of that stuff higher than ever before. Gas prices: higher than ever before. …Add just a little bit more inflation to the food, you’re at a breaking point.
Meanwhile, what everybody missed on what happened with Cantor. …It wasn’t about the border. It was about “nobody’s listening to me any more. I don’t want people coming across our border. I want you guys to hold people responsible in Washington, D.C.”
You got that? Beck feels all Americans’ economic pain but his “solution” is to elect people to block immigration reform. Even though Americans clearly want it. And once again, there was no apology or remorse for the incendiary hate mongering that was his stock in trade before he decided to go all "uniter" on us.
Nevertheless, Beck had the gall to say:
So what’s happening is, people are seeing, “I’m working hard. I’m playing by the rules. Nobody’s listening to me. I’m invisible. These guys are getting’ away with murder. Well, why am I playing by the rules if they don’t play by the rules?”
And then if a crisis hits, we tear each other apart. We’ve got to return home, find our way back to each other. We’re a house divided against itself. We’ve got to come together.
So why did Beck support Cantor’s opponent, David Brat? Brat is clearly a “my way or the highway” kind of politician. For example, as Mother Jones quote him, he doesn’t believe in the “common” good:
“Common-“ anything I’m against. United Nations. Common everything. If you say common, by definition you’re saying it’s top-down. I’m going to force this on you. That’s what dictators do.
Yet, in the name of “fairness,” Mother Jones also reports that Brat supports drastic cuts to Social Security.
Maybe Beck should ask some of those regular Americans he professes to care about so much how they’d like to “come together” over that. If the question occurred to Kelly, she kept it to herself.
You can watch Beck's latest schtick below.
His approach to the fostering of unity is based on eliminating any dissenters, physicaly.
Mmmmmm. Wasn’t that the attitude that led to the catastrophic wars launched under the administration of GWB?
(I suspect that the latter was a puppet in the hands of some truly evil people who – unlike Beck – were smart enough to stop short of appearing completely and totally, off-the-wall batsh*t crazy).