Glenn Beck News, Glenn Beck Pictures

He’s so dumb, he must be a hero to the right

On both his radio and Fox News programs this week, Glenn Beck sought to show how the U.S. is ” repeating the exact mistakes” that led to the fall of the Roman Republic. But according to Roman history experts consulted by Media Matters, Beck’s history lesson distorted or fabricated key facts.

Glenn Beck is the dumbest man in the world.

Time to add someone to the chalkboard of doom!

Glenn Beck spent the past week denouncing the liberal billionaire and philanthropist George Soros as a “puppet master” who is orchestrating a coup ”to bring America to her knees.”

Given Soros’ alleged role plotting to destroy the United States, Beck and his Fox viewership might be surprised to learn that one of Sarah Palin’s top aides has been on Soros’ payroll for years.

That would be Republican lobbyist Randy Scheunemann, Palin’s foreign policy adviser and a member of her small inner circle. He runs a Washington, D.C., consulting firm called Orion Strategies. Scheunemann and a partner have since 2003 been paid over $150,000 by one of Soros’ organizations for lobbying work, according to federal disclosure forms reviewed by Salon. The lobbying, which has continued to the present, centers on legislation involving sanctions and democracy promotion in Burma.

Did I scare you? Glenn Beck is trying really hard to. It is pretty laughable.

Again.

The League of Women Voters has filed complaints with police in Evanston, IL and the FBI saying that one of their officials has been targeted by death threats relating to a candidatess debate she moderated last week. Kathy Tate-Bradish was a volunteer moderator at the October 21 debate in the state’s 8th District and sparked conservative outrage when she expressed what was perceived as ‘lukewarm’ support for reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

Link

Fox News’ Glenn Beck increasingly echoes the theories and conclusions of Alex Jones, a fringe conspiracy theorist and host of a daily radio show promoting those theories. These include belief in the imposition of a ‘new world order’ and global government, opposition to the Federal Reserve, and attacks on Cass Sunstein, John Holdren, and the Council on Foreign Relations.

NYT: Soros Donates $1 Million to Media Matters

Media Matters, the liberal activist group that wages a rhetorical war against Fox News Channel and others in the conservative press, will announce today that it has received a $1 million donation from the philanthropist George Soros.

In a statement obtained by The Caucus, the organization says it plans to use the money to intensify its efforts to hold the Fox host Glenn Beck and others on the cable news channel accountable for their statements.

“Fox has transformed itself into a 24-7 G.O.P. attack machine, dividing Americans through fear-mongering and falsehoods and undermining the legitimacy of our government for partisan political ends,” according to the group’s statement, which will be released this afternoon.

In an accompanying statement, Mr. Soros, a billionaire who has a history of supporting liberal politicians and causes, accused Fox News hosts of “incendiary rhetoric” and said he hoped that his money would be used “in an effort to more widely publicize the challenge Fox News poses to civil and informed discourse in our democracy.”

Details:

After the 2008 election, Fox News personalities filled the airwaves with increasingly violent rhetoric and apocalyptic language. On his Fox News show, Beck talked about “put[ting] poison” in Pelosi’s wine.

Observers of this most recent act were mystified by one of Byron Williams’ reported targets: the Tides Foundation, a low-profile charitable organization known for funding environmentalists, community groups, and other organizations.

Beck, it turned out, had attacked Tides 29 times on his Fox News show in the year-and-a-half leading up to the shooting.

Now, in exclusive interviews and written correspondence with journalist John Hamilton, Williams speaks for himself. He asks Hamilton to be his “media advocate” and repeatedly instructs him to watch specific broadcasts of Beck’s show for information on the conspiracy theory that drove him over the edge: an intricate plot involving Barack Obama, philanthropist George Soros, a Brazilian oil company, and the BP disaster.

Genius.

The reality is, of course, far less sinister than the Glenn Beck-branded conspiracy theory.

From an interview with Frances Fox Piven:

JGP. What do you think is behind this and other right-wing attacks on your work and attempts to link it to the economic strategy of the Obama administration?

FFP. This is the aspect that isn’t funny. Quite simply, they are telling a story that, riddled with wild errors though it may be, makes a kind of sense to many people. It makes sense because it creates a palpable villain and a narrative about what the villain did to cause changes in the US that discomfit many Americans.

JGP. You and Richard Cloward wrote an article for The Nation in 1966 titled ‘A Strategy to End Poverty’2 which has become, as Peter Dreier notes, the ‘centerpiece of a right-wing conspiracy theory.’3 Could you describe what you were trying to do in that article in the context of the struggles of the 1960s? How have the arguments and claims in that article been characterized and put to work in contemporary right-wing demonology?

FFP. The article proposed a campaign to enroll eligible people in the welfare program. We knew from our work with Mobilization for Youth on the Lower East Side in New York City that the welfare department was turning many eligible people away, sometimes giving them bus tickets to go back south. We also knew from our research that this was a widespread practice, with the consequence that less than half of those who were eligible for welfare benefits were receiving them. So we tried to think through the consequences of a campaign for full coverage, including the fiscal and political troubles it would cause in the cities, and the policy responses of a Democratic federal government that depended on its big city base, including the increasingly militant poor minorities in its urban base. We thought there was a good chance that such a welfare ‘crisis’ would prompt a Democratic administration to federalize the program, and improve it. In fact some of the categorical assistance programs were federalized with the creation of the Supplemental Security Income program in 1974. Moreover, there was no downside to the strategy because along the way desperately poor people got welfare, food stamp and Medicaid benefits. But this was a considerably more modest strategy for reform than Glenn Beck and his ilk perceive.”

It’s also worth noting that a Breitbart foot soldier – Kyle Olson – went to Piven’s house and interviewed her, pretending he was working on a report for school but was actually working for one of Andrew Breitbart’s websites.