Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America (7 page)

What a crazy thought.

Some would call Beck crazy for ranking, in his list called “Top Ten Bastards of All Time,” Franklin Roosevelt and Tiger Woods as more evil than Pol Pot, and Keith Olbermann more evil than Hitler. But maybe that was just good marketing for his book
Arguing with Idiots
.

Some would call Beck crazy for having on his show an actor dressed up in Colonial garb and pretending he is Thomas Paine while reading the words of Beck himself. The Paine impersonator listed the economic stimulus legislation as the equivalent of Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center attack. But maybe that was just good television.

Beck will frequently pepper his thoughts with a “maybe I’m crazy” disclaimer. “Maybe I’m crazy for going down this road,” he said after suggesting that Obama was attempting to enslave teenagers. “Maybe I’m crazy, and people say I am,” he said before suggesting that the federal government aimed to take over states. “I’m on the verge of moral collapse at any time,” he said on CNN one night in 2006, discussing an evangelical minister’s sex scandal.

The paranoia inevitably came to the attention of Comedy Central, where Jon Stewart did an extended imitation of Beck before the chalkboard.

“Believing there should be a minimum standard for how much lead can be in our paint might lead to the government having the right to sterilize and kill Jews,” Stewart/Beck declared. “I’m not saying that might be the case—I’m saying that’s the case!”

“Follow me, America!” Stewart shouted, impersonating the standard opening for Beck’s show. “Why am I the only one saying it?” he continued. “Am I crazy, or …” Stewart trailed off. “Okay,” he said.

Stewart, at the chalkboard, followed Beck’s circles, which purported to link America with Europe, then Russia, then China. “It’s so ingenious it almost doesn’t make any sense whatsoever,” Stewart/Beck said, then later summarized the Beck worldview: “If you subscribe to an idea, you also subscribe to that idea’s ideology, and to every possible negative consequence that holding that ideology applies when you carry it to absurd extremes. For instance, progressives, if you believe in a minimal safety net for the nation’s neediest, you believe in total and absolute government control.”

Then Stewart turned the philosophy against its creator: “If you believe that faith provides a strong moral template for our nation’s foundation, it can only lead to totalitarian theocracy.” With that, he drew more Beckian circles on the board and pasted up a photo of the Ayatollah Khomeini.

“That was hysterical,” Beck reported on his show the next night about Stewart’s parody. “He’s saying that I’m crazy and all of this kind of stuff.”

But Beck isn’t crazy. Crazy is just part of his repertoire. If there was any doubt about this, it should have been dispelled way back in November 2006, when Beck took a call on his radio show accusing him of racism.

“Let me just, wait wait, Rod,” he told the caller. “I’m not just going to let you throw down these race cards because obviously you’re somebody who likes to throw the race card and you don’t even understand what the race card is,” Beck said calmly.

The caller also wasn’t pleased with Beck’s joke about wishing a nuclear explosion in France. “I stand by that,” Beck said.

The caller began to retreat from his accusation—“all right, so if I’m wrong”—but Beck had plans for him.

“Oh, you know what? I’m not even going to tolerate this anymore, Rod. Because you, obviously, sir—” Beck began calmly. Then, suddenly, he erupted. “GET OFF MY PHONE!! … Do I want to vaporize France? AS MUCH AS I WANT TO VAPORIZE YOU!!” Beck was leaning forward in his chair, waving his arms madly and shrieking. “You’re lucky I don’t have some sort of equipment where I could vaporize you right now because I’d keep pushing the button over and over and over and over and over again!” Beck calmed momentarily, and said, “Now that, sir, is what I would call comedy. Do I really want to vaporize you?” Beck returned to his screaming: “YES I DO!!”

Beck flipped on his theme music, then leaned back in his chair. He was perfectly calm, and wearing an enormous grin. Still smiling, he took a swig from the bottle in front of him. The fury, the violent talk, the shouting—in short, the craziness? All for show.

CHAPTER 6
A HEMORRHOID ON THE BODY POLITIC

Countless people have considered Glenn Beck to be a pain in the ass. But for once, he was the one with a sore bottom.

“I’m just at home, and I’m recovering from some surgery that was scheduled and then went horribly awry,” Beck, stubbly-faced, his head on a pillow, said to the camera for a video that was posted on his Web site. “I said on the way to the hospital, if I die, God forbid this makes it into the paper. I want to make sure this is not the way I’m remembered.”

Understandably. Beck nearly met his end because of botched hemorrhoid surgery.

Just after Christmas 2007, he was admitted to a hospital for outpatient surgery on his rear end, but then woke up on the operating table. The painkillers were so intense they impaired his breathing. He went home, only to return a couple of hours later to the emergency room, where he found the service most unacceptable. He needed a catheter because he couldn’t urinate, and wound up spending five days in the hospital in a narcotics-induced haze. He found the hospital staff—MSNBC viewers, perhaps—to be rude and generally unconcerned about his pain and suffering.

When he got home, he began to plan a multimedia assault on the American health-care system. “Don’t talk to me about health care,” he wrote on his Web site. “Don’t talk to me about HMOs. Don’t talk to me about anything else. Don’t talk to me about how you need a new CAT scan. Don’t talk to me about how you need a new facility. Talk to me about how you could have a hospital full of people that don’t see people in pain.”

He discussed the gory details: “Your bladder usually holds about 400 ccs. My bladder, when they finally emptied it, was 1,500.” He spoke of hopelessness: “By Saturday night I was ready to kill myself.”

Overall, he said in his video, “it was one of the most eye-opening experiences of my life to receive health care in the United States today in not one of our more glorious medical institutions, even though I live in a very nice area. This hospital … was phenomenal, phenomenally bad.” Beck had no mercy for the capitalists running this cruel place. “I have some stories that will melt your brain. And hopefully will melt the brain of the CEO of this hospital, to wake him up to find out what’s going on and it should be a wake-up call to all of us, because this is one of the hospitals where the president of GE is going. If they don’t care about the president of GE, you really think they care about schlubs that are just average working stiffs?”

Beck sounded like a changed man. “I think it really opened my eyes,” he told his followers. “Join me for my new perspective on life, our health-care system, and blood shooting from places blood should not shoot out of,” he said, teasing his upcoming show.

Beck was still on CNN. In January 2008, he went back on the air and spoke of his “personal voyage through the nightmare that is our health-care system.” He began the show by saying: “No matter how much the health-care system would try to keep me down, I’m back … Getting well in this country could actually almost kill you.”

For those not paying attention, Beck filled them in. “It was butt surgery. I had surgery on my ass.” He said he had seen the health-care system “at its very worst.” He complained that he was “nothing more than a number,” and “I felt like I was at a DMV.” He acknowledged that “we do have a health-care crisis in this country,” even if he didn’t think the government or the insurance companies could fix it.

The next day, Beck was on
Good Morning America
with a similar message. “Let’s emphasize the word ‘care’ in health care,” he proposed.

Alas, it seems that this was the painkillers talking.

Within mere months, Beck had forgotten his complaints about the health-care system. In June 2008, he played a clip of Barack Obama campaigning for the White House with a promise for health-care reform: “We will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick.”

Retorted Beck: “America already has the best health care in the world. We do take care of our sick.”

Never mind that “nightmare that is our health-care system.” Beck now boasted that the United States was the place where “anybody who’s sick and wealthy in the world” comes. “You’re about to lose the best health-care system in the world,” he told his viewers. He saw no reason to “spend $1 trillion to overhaul the best health-care system in the world.”

“The best health-care system in the world and you’re going to change it?” he demanded. “Republicans, call their bluff!”

As it happens, Beck was about to have another experience inside the best health-care system in the world. He was doing his daily radio broadcast one day in November 2009 when he began to complain on air that he wasn’t feeling well. He left the show and went to a Manhattan hospital, where he underwent surgery for appendicitis. There were no complications this time—outside of
The Daily Show
, that is, on which Stewart gave Beck a taste of his own medicine.

“This appendix thing is not an isolated incident!” the comedian said, adding that “the stakes are nothing less than Glenn Beck’s internal organs!”

After some Beckian weeping, Stewart went on: “I’m just a concerned American citizen like you questioning what’s going on inside Glenn Beck, and if you don’t get these answers, you ask again and again and again! Because you know who else didn’t answer medical questions? Hitler.”

And that was before the conspiracy against Glenn Beck’s health claimed another victim: his eyesight. In July 2010 he told followers that he had an eye condition called macular dystrophy, and “could go blind in the next year.”

It was tricky to parody Beck, because Stewart could come up with nothing more outlandish than things Beck himself had said in earnest. He had, for example, presented an extended comparison between Obama’s health-care plan and Nazi efforts to build a master race.

It began even before the health-care push. “So here you have Barack Obama going in and spending money on embryonic stem cell research,” he said after Obama lifted the ban on such federal research. “Remember, those great progressive doctors are the ones who brought us eugenics … In case you don’t know what eugenics led us to: the Final Solution. A master race! A perfect person … The stuff that we are facing is absolutely frightening. So I guess I have to put my name on yes, I hope Barack Obama fails.”

It was a slippery-slope argument greased with Crisco. “When we put science in front of ethics,” Beck reasoned, “we start having a bunch of people walking around, especially progressive scientists, walking around in little white coats and talking about—hey, we can make the master race?”

When Democrats began to float their health-care proposals, there was no mention of eugenics, but Beck was not fooled. “What does this new health-care system that they’re trying to push through in the middle of the night have to do with eugenics? The seed, the germ,” he explained.

The seed was planted. Beck cultivated it regularly. In August 2009, as lawmakers’ “town-hall” meetings were exploding in anger over health-care reform, Beck gave the demonstrators plenty to be angry about.

“You have three people in the White House that are in love with eugenics or whatever it is you would call it today,” Beck informed his radio listeners. “Please, dear God, read history. Please, dear God, read the truth of what these people have said in their own words, and ask yourself this one question: Do you trust these people enough to give them control over who lives and who dies?”

A few nights later, Beck was detailing the supposedly pro-eugenics views. One of the guilty was the head of regulatory policy, Cass Sunstein. His offense? “One of his good friends,” an academic named Peter Singer, wrote an article titled “Why We Must Ration Health Care.” Never mind that Sunstein himself hadn’t said any such thing: Guilt by association was evidence enough in Beck’s court.

Beck turned to his guests, author R. J. Pestritto, law professor Carter Snead, and former Bush administration official John Hoff. “Gentlemen, first of all, does anybody here believe eugenics is coming, building a master race?”

His guests did not believe this. “No, sir, absolutely not,” came the reply. It was time for Beck to find some new guests. Sure enough, he was back a few weeks later with Pastor Stephen Broden, who claimed to have chronicled “the eugenics movement and black genocide taking place in America today.”

Beck genuinely seemed to be convinced that an African American president, advised by a Jewish chief of staff, was intent on building a master race. “The reason why I bring up Hitler so much of the time is because what he did, many of the things, had their roots, their seeds here in America,” Beck explained. “The progressive tactics haven’t changed much since then.”

Beck’s tactics hadn’t changed much either. His own displeasure with the health-care system was now a distant memory. He set about demonstrating that Obama’s health-care legislation would cause rationing of care and euthanasia of the old and infirm. “Really, this is the beginning,” he argued. “I mean, you know, the extreme example is what happened in Germany … Sometimes for the common good, you just have to say, ‘Hey Grandpa, you’ve had a good life. Sucks to be you.’ ”

There was nothing in the proposed bill that even hinted at such an idea, but Beck offered proof in the form of constant repetition. “The government is going to have to start rationing care during the last six months of life,” he said with certainty. “There’s going to be waiting lines and there’s going to be some bureaucrat deciding whether or not you should die.”

When Sarah Palin came out with her “death panel” allegation in August 2009—adding fuel to that month’s town-hall conflagration, Beck quickly endorsed the theme. “That’s quite a statement. I believe it to be true,” he said of the accusation that the law would create euthanasia boards. After Obama himself pointed out that there was no such thing in the proposal, Beck came back with this: “He was saying yesterday in this meeting that nobody’s going to snuff out your grandma, and the crowd was laughing. You laugh all the way to the death panels.”

Beck continued to defend Palin’s death-panels accusation. “She is right,” he proclaimed. “Basically, they come up with the number of maximum treatment costs per year to keep you alive.” Again, there was nothing about this in the bill.

As the health-care bill followed its tortuous route to passage, Beck kept up the barrage: “Somebody is not going to get a kidney transplant. Somebody is not going to get heart surgery. Somebody is not going to get chemotherapy.” Specifically, Beck forecast that by age forty, “you’re starting to outlive your usefulness,” and by seventy, “you’re out of luck, Jack.”

Whenever a new allegation bubbled up through the conservative blogosphere, Beck took it to his viewers. There was, for example, the accusation, based on nothing but imagination, that those who don’t heed the “individual mandate” to have health insurance will be locked away in prison. “If you don’t play ball with them now, if you don’t get into their government health care, there will be jail time.” (In reality, the legislation expressly forbids imprisoning those who refuse.)

Another day, Beck spun an entire fantasy about what health-care legislation would do—including dietary restrictions and deciding who can reproduce. “They will tell you what to eat,” he intoned. “If you can be deemed someone who maybe shouldn’t have a baby, they can have their people come in. The government is in our homes on this.”

The health-care debate went painfully on and on, like a botched hemorrhoid operation. At each stage, Beck found a new way to describe the bill as the End of the World as We Know It.

“Your freedom is at stake. This is the moment. This is the bill. You must not allow this to pass,” he said in November 2009. “It will be a nail in the coffin of America … You must wake everybody up you know. This is the end of prosperity in America forever if this bill passes. This is the end of America as you know it.”

In January, he declared that Democrats were declaring “the government God, our creator.” He added: “This is the end of the American Constitution.”

The next month, he summoned his troops to the ramparts. “Republicans, you filibuster! You do everything you can!” he said. If the bill passes, “the Republic has frayed beyond, possibly, beyond repair.” He spoke of revenge at the polls, “assuming there’s a country left for a next election.”

In March, he escalated to visions of violence. “If it passes,” Beck said, Obama will have “the pieces that the president needs to control every aspect of your life, to fundamentally transform America.” And if it doesn’t pass, “those on the left are going to become violent.” The laws will, he said, “rip this country in half.”

Yet the bill continued its halting progress toward eventual passage. Dr. Beck took out an X-ray film on the set. “What they’re about to pass is not a tumor,” he said. “What they’re about to pass is a bloodstream disease. It will be injected into our system and it will be incurable … The fundamental transformation of America is here.”

The bill passed. And, as of this writing, there are still no death panels, no eugenics, no euthanasia, nobody being sent to prison, no ripping in half of the country, no end of America as we know it, no nail in America’s coffin. Then again, maybe this is because of the painkillers; any day now, we could wake up with a huge pain in our national butt.