Stu Blog

After I wrote a quick blog in response to a story on Glenn in the Weekly Standard, a few different sites picked it up. Eventually, there was actually some interesting discussion. This was surprising considering the Standard’s original article was almost exclusively worthless.

Jonah Goldberg finds that the Standard comes up short.

I could go on. But I’ll just leave it here: A more fair-minded treatment of Beck would at least acknowledge that Beck is right about a lot of things, that he gets people to read worthwhile and mainstream conservative and libertarian books, and that a good number of his fans and followers are perfectly capable of making up their own minds. And a more fair-minded treatment of the tea parties wouldn’t use them as a Trojan Horse for an attack on Beck.

Matthew Vadum spends two posts, with more coming, absolutely destroying the Standard.

The first:

Continetti offers as proof of Beck’s lunacy his assertion in Glenn Beck’s Common Sense that, “With a few notable exceptions, our political leaders have become nothing more than parasites who feed off our sweat and blood.”

My gut reaction to that sentence was: And?

Are there any thinking Americans remaining out there who actually, naively, foolishly believe that the bulk of the nation’s politicians are interested in doing anything other than perpetuating themselves in office? That’s why there is a Tea Party movement that has been embraced by Americans everywhere and from all walks of life.

The second:

That Beck almost singlehandedly moved large numbers of Americans in the dark, depressing early months of the Obama presidency to begin questioning the Dear Leader’s divinely inspired plan for a new America is barely acknowledged by Continetti. Make no mistake: cable TV’s Rick Santelli may have fired the first shot against Obamaism but Beck was the force that drove home the point to the American people that Obama meant it when he said he wanted to “radically transform” America.

Hotair had a thoughtful post on it as well:

Is prophylactic government inevitably and uncontrollably a road to serfdom?  Glenn Beck would say yes.  (So would Hayek, if with more precision and analytical care.)  Buy into the concept of government needing to intervene to prevent or foster (or guarantee) outcomes, and you have bought the totalitarian premise hook, line, and sinker.  There is no moral or logical brake on the government’s charter to order the people around, if you agree that it should behave prophylactically, in everything from averting the formation of monopolies to averting the formation of cholesterol in your arteries.

…

The conservative side is where the question still lives, whether government can be entrusted with prophylaxis in the people’s lives.  It’s worth noting that over the last century, every prediction of those who say it can’t has come true.

And, at the National Review, Daniel Foster, says he lands in between Glenn and the Standard, but levels a few weak attacks at my “attack.”

While Beck’s producer says the whole piece is “a collection of lies,” his criticism is confined almost exclusively to the bolded sentences above (the top ten list) which he says were part of a joke that Continetti has taken out of context. Fair enough, but Continetti’s larger point — that Beck’s likening of progressivism to totalitarianism is paranoid and counterproductive — hardly seems to turn on the Top Ten list.

The reason I focused “almost exclusively” on the list was because it was the easiest to illustrate in a short blog. It was a quick way to show he was being disingenuous. I didn’t keep it short because there wasn’t anything else in the article to criticize. I couldn’t care less if people take shots at Glenn. But…try. Try to do it well.

However—I, “Beck’s producer,” am a man of the people. If you want more, I’m happy to provide. More to come after I get out of July 4^th vacation mode.

As I previously mentioned, the liberal magazine, The Nation, wrote a story about Glenn called Why the Far Right Hates Soccer. Of course, it’s not politics that makes me hate soccer, it’s soccer.

The Nation resorts to a bunch of the typical soccer-defending nonsense.

First of all, I always find it amusing when folks like Beck say, “We don’t like soccer” when it is by far the most popular youth sport in the United States.

I’ve heard this for years, and still find it suspicious for some reason. In fact, I’m launching my own personal jihad against this statistic (or perhaps “giant murderous in stadium riot” is more appropriate).

There is solid evidence that soccer is the most popular sport in the world. But the evidence for it being the most popular youth sport in America is much weaker. Plenty of people claim it, sure. But, I find it hard to believe. Soccer has some advantages over other sports, mainly that females play it in large numbers when they’re young as well as males. So, it would make sense it would defeat sports like football, even if it were only half as popular.

But, are more kids really playing soccer than basketball? Or baseball? Really? It’s not impossible I guess, if you include really small kids. For example, some of my friends with really little ones have them in soccer leagues because at that level, there are basically no rules. It’s pretty much running around and occasionally kicking a ball. It’s not really even soccer—so, I attend the game and yell at the lil’ tots angrily for skewing the statistics.

Enough guesstimating though—lets look at what the interwebs say. There’s a lot of outdated and somewhat questionable and vague info out there. CNN says soccer is growing, but only that it “remains one of the country’s most popular youth sports.” Livestrong says Soccer is in the “top five for youth” in both gender groups. Overall, soccer ranks no higher than 4^th in any of the rankings from this site. Also in overall participatory sports—soccer is ranked 23^rd on this list.

Wikipedia does say “It is the most popular recreational sport for both boys and girls and has been so for more than 30 years” with no footnote. I could have sworn there was one last time I checked it that pointed to a pro-soccer documentary, without specifics.

Regardless–let’s take the idea that soccer is the most popular youth sport for 30 years at face value for arguments sake. Wouldn’t this prove once and for all that soccer truly sucks? Kids play soccer for various reasons that usually start with their parents signing them up for a league without too much regard for their opinion on the matter. Then they experience the sport for years, learn about it in depth, and then when they can finally grow up and watch it, they choose not to. These aren’t people who are ignoring soccer without information—oh, no—they know the game, have played the game, and they still ignore it as Glenn does celery.

More from The Nation:

But maybe this isn’t just sports as avatar for their racism and imperial arrogance. Maybe their hysteria lies in something far more shallow. Maybe the real reason they lose their collective minds is simply because the USA tends to get their asses handed to them each and every World Cup.

This is probably partially true. But, so what? If we were the beating everyone else’s “asses” in soccer like in everything else, we probably would pay slightly more attention to it. It still would be lucky to be our 5^th or 6^th viewing sport, but maybe we at least acknowledge the MLS exists. Maybe.

However, can’t you say the same thing about the world soccer powers? Why don’t they love our football? I don’t see any of the “stan” or “uguay” countries obsessing over the intricacies of the Cover 2 defense. Why are they so nationalist?? Why do they hate the white man so?

Yes, we will care a little more about a sport that we perform well in–and we’ll be more into it when we can root for America. But–we even care about curling every four years. That’s because we like America, not curling.

When the main arguments for the merit of your sport are that four year olds play it until they realize how boring it is, and that the only thing that inspires America to care about it is patriotism—your sport sucks.

Here’s a recent attack on Glenn…it’s pretty standard fare from the left, but stay tuned for the payoff.

Beck’s book Arguing with Idiots contains a list of the “Top Ten Bastards of All Time,” on which Pol Pot (No. 10), Adolf Hitler (No. 6), and Pontius Pilate (No. 4) all rank lower than FDR (No. 3) and Woodrow Wilson (No. 1). In Glenn Beck’s Common Sense Beck writes, “With a few notable exceptions, our political leaders have become nothing more than parasites who feed off our sweat and blood.”

This is nonsense. Whatever you think of Theodore Roosevelt, he was not Lenin. Woodrow Wilson was not Stalin.

Seriously? Any “idiot” reading this would realize this segment from the book is a joke. It’s mostly a way to exaggerate Glenn’s hatred for Woodrow Wilson. Does anyone really believe that Glenn thinks Theodore Roosevelt and Josef Stalin are equals? One of the two did some progressive things that Glenn doesn’t like. The other killed tens of millions of people.

Of course, the joke would be more obvious, if the most obvious jokes weren’t edited out of the critique. For example #2 on the same list is Tiger Woods (and this is before the cheating scandal, back when everyone thought he was the perfect guy living the perfect life.) Does anyone think Glenn believes a (supposedly perfect) golfer is a bigger bastard than Adolf Hitler?

If you needed more clarity, here is the description of why Woods was a “bastard”:

“He’s got a Swedish-supermodel wife, a gazillion dollars and he plays golf for a living…bastard!”

Does that seem like a serious policy or historic analysis? Could anyone possibly mistake it for something serious that wasn’t trying to intentionally take Glenn out of context to smear him?

The worst part of all of this is the source. Yes, you’d expect this nonsense from the Olbermadthews ilk at MSNBC. But, how the hell are we getting that analysis from The Weekly Standard?

Look, we usually love The Weekly Standard. They are typically an extremely useful and important source of analysis (I think?). But, this is horrible. It’s a hit piece barely worthy of Media Matters, and I’d rate it as impossible that the author doesn’t know it.

The piece is filled with so many discredited attacks and poorly researched nonsense (the list is just one small example) that you might think it is just laziness. But it’s worse than that. It’s intentionally misleading. It’s a collection of lies they are proud of.  They put it on the cover. I mean, it’s enough to doubt anything they print.

I don’t understand the motivation, but luckily their circulation is so impossibly small that Glenn reaches more people in 11 seconds on the air than they do in 6 months. Oh, but how will we compete with those creative cartoons on the cover!!! So innovative for 1962!

Truly embarrassing work.

You can cancel your subscription by calling 1-800-274-7293. When you’re done…might I suggest another option.

**By the way, as I said on the air, I don’t believe in boycotts.  Ever.  You do what you want with your money.