Is That A Poll In Your Pants or...

"...A Times/CBS poll of Tea Party supporters confirmed what we all suspected — two-thirds of them admit to getting all or most of their “news” from Fox News. These are true ‘people of the bubble” who are genuinely surprised if we laugh at them for believing that the president was born in Kenya. Inside their bubble it’s a twilight world of distemper, paranoia, and rumor where the warm light of reason (or even the dim light of neutrality) will never fall. Where did the Tea Party get the dizzy notion that health care reform was some kind of communist plot? Fox personality Glenn Beck, the unstable caveman now routinely described as “the guru of the new right wing,” was monitored by the Politico website for his use of inflammatory buzzwords while America debated health care. Its log showed Beck saying “Marxist” 127 times, “communist” 330 times and “socialist” 404 times. This kind of demagoguery leaves nothing to chance. Herding the uncomprehending for the enrichment of the cynical won’t win you a place in heaven, but it’s highly lucrative. In his first year tracking communists for Fox, Beck increased his audience by more than 50% and became the hottest property on cable TV, with an eight-figure salary...

Still, Beck is a special head case. Testing his limits, he’s pressing boldly into unmapped territory on the Outer Right, out where few public figures have ventured since Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare or Father Coughlin’s pro-Nazi broadcasts of the ‘30s. (Though Father Coughlin, no whore to Wall Street, called capitalism and communism the two horns of Satan, which is still worth considering.) In a recent outburst Beck warned his radio audience to boycott any church that preaches social justice — code words for Communism and Nazism, he declared — and was quickly repudiated by his own Mormon Church. Last week he denounced Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” and Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” as subversive, un-American music. If Beck had stumbled onto Dan Pollitt’s memorial service in Chapel Hill, he would have called the FBI. Even his on-camera colleagues at Fox, solemn purveyors of audience-tested right-wing bombast, have been eyeing Beck uneasily. Just as the Republican Party grows increasingly wary of the Tea Party—-what kind of woolly-wild candidate might it take to win their votes, how far right is there before you fall off the edge of the American mind?—-smug corporate reactionaries are beginning to suspect that Glenn Beck really means it, and that he may be inconveniently deranged..."

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