He's just jealous someone else is getting attention.

I am terrified of having to be on O'Reilly's side in an argument.

I tried to watch Beck explain his position on fascism. But I absolutely couldn't stand to listen to him. I lasted about 20 seconds.

This guy is a self-indulgent idiot. The only thing I can stand to watch are his crying jags.

That he's pulling in more than 2 million viewers is baffling. Who are these people?

Meanwhile, right out of the gate the first concern of Debbie Schlussel is....

By Debbie Schlussel

So, the identity of the shooter at the American Civic Association has been learned: Jiverly Voong, 42, had just lost his job at IBM.

But there's an interesting piece of info that's come out in the reporting and it may point to immigration fraud at the center.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Thirteen innocents dead at the hands of a madman and Schlussel wants our attention misdirected to allegations of fraud at the site of the slaughter. Classy to the end.

I think Beck is actually a threat to Fox News' credibility, even among people who get all their news there. He is so transparently absurd, even idiots have trouble suspending disbelief.

What's happening is the full Birchification of Fox News.

Beck is so stupid that he makes Sean Hannity look smart.

And he is so crazy that he makes O'Reilly look sane.

Seriously, I don't think his act is an act. I think Beck really means it. And that is what should frighten Bill O'Reilly more than anything. As nutty as he sounds sometimes (okay, most of the time), O'Reilly is not a lunatic. He's a guy earning a fat paycheck with a routine that works for him: conservative blowhard.

But Beck is not in that category. Beck is serious, and he is a symbol of the metastasizing derangement of Fox "News."

Roger Ailes said it himself, reportedly, when he hired Beck. He said that in the age of Obama, Fox News is the Alamo.

"I see this as the Alamo," Ailes said, according to Beck. "If I just had somebody who was willing to sit on the other side of the camera until the last shot is fired, we'd be fine."

That couldn't have suited Beck more. In making the jump to the top-rated cable news channel from HLN, where he had a show for two years, he hoped to alert more people to one of his consuming fears: that the government's handling of the economic crisis is ushering in an era of socialism.

"Look in your rear-view mirror; we just passed France," he said. "I think our country is on the verge of disintegration."

So, the chief of Fox "News" and his new star have adopted a post-apocalyptic seige mindset and are willing to die holding off a Democratic president.

O'Reilly and everyone else at Fox "News" who thinks they're working for a sane organization should find that very chilling.

Reading Southern Poverty Law Center's magazine, its really clear how important it is that people are called on these excessive terms. This BS at Fox, the posting earlier this week about the call to arms in Washington State over water pollution laws, all the inane blather from the right about the "socialist" or "Nazi" or whatever description given to Obama's policies is dangerous. People who lean towards these actions or beliefs are encouraged that much more to carry them out, and all the noise obscures the fact that there are really Nazi's and other hate groups in the US, working to root out any one and everyone they find objectionable, by skin tone, national origin and all the other ways they can. Any of these people, even on Fox, need to be called out for this foolishness.

"according to Beck 'fascism = more/bigger government". What a deluded dolt. All forms of government can be bigger or smaller. It is the authoritarian nature, the secrecy, the squashing of dissent, the merging of corporate and government power, the extreme nationalism, the intimidation and intolerance that marks 'fascism'. Beck is more of an idiot than the law should allow. Take him to task Bill. I would not want to be associated with him either.

The few times I could stomach O'Reilly's mug on TV, I noticed that the guy likes to think of himself as "fair" and "honest". Whether that's TV persona or whether he really believes it is besides the point, he really tries to make his rants look and feel like actual political commentary. Gives his opponents "the last word", etc. So it only stands to reason that Beck would be the perfect foil: a scary deranged guy that makes O'Reilly look like a reasonable, down-to-Earth guy.

Which is scary: this will make O'Reilly's pronouncements look like they make sense. Next to Beck, he appears credible. I doubt the network is doing this on purpose, but I bet O'Reilly would gladly seize the opportunity to sit in calm opposition to Beck, rather than feed off his madness.

Hot off the intertubes is the evolving results of this inflammatory hate speech. The headlines will soon be thus: Right Wing Hate Speech Kills Cops

A man opened fire on officers during a domestic disturbance call Saturday morning, killing three of them, a police official said. Friends said he feared the Obama administration was poised to ban guns.

[snip]

One friend, Edward Perkovic, said the gunman feared ''the Obama gun ban that's on the way'' and ''didn't like our rights being infringed upon.'' Another longtime friend, Aaron Vire, said he feared that President Obama was going to take away his rights, though he said he ''wasn't violently against Obama.''

Beck is clearly a televangelist for right wing ideology. This is why he is so popular on Fox News.

Beck is a toxic ass-set.

O'Reilly is not exactly a voice of reason.

Yet both have enormous viewership "clout."

We can rant all we want about the insanity of Glen and Bill, but the fact remains that there ARE lots of folks whose braincells resonate with the garbage that Fox News spews.

My concern is that Fox just might be a powerful wingnut recruiting device.

Face it. 99% of humanity is dumber than many of us.

I don't think politically-correctness caused the mass murder in Upstate New York yesterday.

But I do think a gun cult(ure) mentality didn't help.

We go soul searching to answer to the heartache that results from events like Binghamton, but it's pointless to "blame" society for the actions of idividuals.

Beck is an idiot. It would almost be sad to listen to him spew his ignorant crapola if so much of it weren't malicious and potentially harmful. My dream: that when he dies, his hell will consist of endless lectures on political science and economics, which will eventually peel away his protective shell of nescience and expose the tender flesh beneath to the blistering flames of knowledge and regret.

Heh.

Cathy

This is important because, like with the earlier David Horowitz post, what pundits like O'Reilly and Horowitz are hearing on the air is probably only a tip of the iceberg compared to what they're hearing off the air.

What has that crazy Marine general-for-Jesus who retired and joined Blackwater been up to lately?

I'd like to know why O'Reilly really got audited. I doubt it was just that Clinton had a vendetta with him.

I think Beck, Hannity, Limbaugh etal are right-wing propagandists who are not unlike Al Qaeda in many ways. They seem bent on destroying our nation by bringing out the worst in people's fears. The FCC should be able to do something. Freedom of Speech IS NOT the same thing as INCITING TO RIOT, and that's what they're trying to do!

IMO O'Reilly is bothered by the fact that Beck is the new sensation at Fox News, so he had him on to show him who the boss is, as evidenced by his quote "I have the biggest mouth in the country, and you're number 2."

Bill is just trying to deflate him a little bit. It's all very sad though that these two clowns are the biggest shows on cable.

"Look in your rear-view mirror; we just passed France," he said.

And we didn't even collect any Gauloise.

I mean, as if France was a horrible place to live, what with the good food, good wine, beautiful people, etc. Let's face it, vacationing in Paris is worse that vacationing in Omaha, and everyone knows it!

"I'd like to know why O'Reilly really got audited."

I think it was probably the business deduction for the loofas.

Glenn Beck is finally home. However, his first attempt at a lovefest was rebuffed by O'Reilly.

It's hilarious! They're scaring each other now!

Political scientist Dr. Lawrence Britt enumerated the "14 Points of Facism" in a 2004 paper. After studying the regimes of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Suharto and Pinochet, he determined that facist governments all had the following in common: powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism; disdain for the importance of human rights; identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause; avid militarism; rampant sexism; a controlled mass media; obsession with national security; the tying together of religion and the ruling elite; the protection of the power of corporations; the supression of labor; disdain for and suppression of intellectuals and the arts;obsession with crime and punishment; rampant cronyism and corruption; and (wait for it...) fraudulent elections. If anything, we were on the brink of facism under Bush. Under Obama...not so much.

Let's face it, vacationing in Paris is worse that vacationing in Omaha, and everyone knows it!

Posted by: Cal Gal

Hey, now. Paris doesn't have the Henry Doorly Zoo, or the College World Series, or the Old Market, or a really cool pedestrian bridge over the Missouri.

Or,....ummm,..... River City Roundup?

Okay, maybe not gay Paree, but I bet you won't find a great reuben sandwich in the Latin Quarter like you can here.

This is clearly on orders from the highest echelons of the GOP to say to the people: If you don't vote for us, this is what you will have to tolerate.

Certainly, the GOP is driving all of these talking points, but they've gotten fairly incoherent as they fling every piece of poo they can, trying to find something that sticks. They've got to get their arguments straight: is it socialism or fascism? It can't be both.

And it's driving their talking heads insane:

Beck's a full-on nut job doing a Howard Beal right in front of us.

O'Reilly's just a rich pervert with a megaphone (as if that's much better), but he starting to talk like a loony too.

Beck is a toxic ass-set.

Can you get anal poisoning from that?

"according to Beck 'fascism = more/bigger government'"

And specifically, here, 'fascism = inflation.' And more vaguely 'fascism = low locus of control', ie, if his audience doesn't feel like it controls its own destiny, it must be the fault of fascism.

This is obviously a motivated abuse of language.

Only unusually hapless souls believe Beck. Haplessness decreases control over one's life. So I suspect that his audience has more reason than most to feel that it doesn't control its own fate. And he gives them somebody to blame other than their own haplessness: it's the fascist government, not their own stupidity, that causes their distress.

Question: he now says he also thought the Bush Administration was moving toward fascism. Did he ever actually say so publicly? I could easily have missed it, but I don't recall that he did. My sense is that this started rather abruptly after Jan. 20.

Presumably, even if Beck isn't quite of normal intelligence, the people who hired him are. Putting aside the enormous moral irresponsiblity of promoting this kind of crude demagoguery, is there even an argument that it's profit maximizing to give him a forum? Or could Fox fairly easily produce alternative programming that returned more value to shareholders?