I will admit to being somewhat crestfallen at the lack of loony-toons wingnuts on parade in all the reporting on the Glenn Beck event over the weekend. Somewhat crestfallen? Who am I kidding? I waited all week long to see a bunch of crazy, ignorant white people with low IQs spouting off on television about things they know nothing of and regurgitating, parrot-style, the predictable tropes and catchphrases that they’d been fed by Fox News, World Net Daily and Rush Limbaugh.

But there was so little of it. What a letdown! The reporting—and what transpired onstage with Beck, Palin, et al—was too bland to even hold my attention. I wanted to see foaming at the mouth nutcases, zany racist signs, people dressed as giant tea bags, in Confederate flag jumpsuits, etc, etc. Perhaps because signs were discouraged, the visuals were lacking, but it sure took all the fun out of the cable new coverage of the event.

But now Chase Whiteside and New Left Media have posted their take on the “Restoring Honor” event and well, it looks to me as if the job the major news channels did has been bested by the “indie” coverage of some students from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. It’s not like you couldn’t throw a rock the distance of, oh, about 12 inches without hitting an idiot, so how did the mainstream media miss these kooks and ignoramuses?

The story that’s not being examined—but should be—is is how fucking DUMB about a quarter of this country is. It’s not Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin or Ted Nugent or any of the rest of them, who are the story, they’re merely symptoms of the greater problem: 20-25% of the American population are abject idiots. That’s the story I want to see the media tackle.
 

 
Via The Daily What

I’ve lived in Arizona my whole life… and that big sloppy lady is right. There are pregnant women standing around in parking lots everywhere here. Just waiting to have their babies.

Dude..have you ever lived in another country for more than a year?

I have, and I assure you that “dumb” is not a uniquely American commodity.

What freaks me out about Becks message, more than anything, is his not so veiled attempt to merge Politics and Faith. He’s defining “morality” and “Honor” in a Faith based context.

This is the the disease that is rotting our world, and this is the disease that both Left Wing Dems and Right Wing Conservatives are not willing to touch, for fear of offending the scencibilities of
intellectually lazy lunatics everywhere.

Except the media make people idiots.  So they’d have to report the story: Why are we creating people who are so fucking stupid?

The problem, as I see it, i that no one on “our side” (progressive, liberal, whatever you want to call it) is offering a consistent, comprehensive vision of what the future should be like.

I know it’s “our” tradition to aggressively agree to disagree and kinda leave “to each his own”, but when I look back on the big victories of liberalism (e.g. suffrage, civil rights) I see a clear vision being articulated. A clear vision that scared the shit out of the powers that be at the time, but a clear vision nonetheless.

I think what we saw with the election of Obama was people rallying around what they thought was a clear vision, and when it turned out to be 85% marketing hype (Hope! Yes We Can! What now exactly?) the spell was broken and the sheep went looking for a shepherd.

And found Glenn Fucking Beck.

Gleck and Palin are more than symptoms of the problem; they are reinforcing and spreading the problem, daily.

Gleck is savagely lazy. Dedicating the rally to servicemen/women and propounding a return to god.

What smart Americans need to concentrate on is keeping a majority come election time. Let these fat, pants-shitting fuckers rot in their own filth.

I love this kid. Always therapeutic to see his reportage after a big teabagger event.

This wasn’t half as bad as I thought it would be. Face it there are dumb asses all over the world. They declare jihad and we eat hot dogs and sit on the grass listening to Glenn Beck, too fat to get up.

Religion discourages free thinking. Education will not help those who won’t listen. Teacher vs. Reverend and the good Rev will win out every time.

I am pretty left of left and this didn’t make me mad. I can smell the fear dripping off these people and it makes me more sad than anything. As the baby boomers get older and more afraid of the world, the media whores will be there to capitalize on those fears and spread mis-information.

I’m feeling the general vibe of this comments thread. I get a kick out of the flickr streams of these tea party events but I’ve seen more than few of these Youtube videos of smarmy young indie journos and it smacks of exploitation. By this point, they’re just making fun of these people and not showing me something I hadn’t seen before. The tea party message resonates with ignorant people because it has no logical base. It’s just one man exploiting the fear of dumbasses in order to sell books and book pricey speaking engagements.

There really isn’t an endgame for the tea party ideal, either, it’s this vague notion of founding fathers and original American values, whatever the hell that means. Stop paying attention to these people and the movement will lose steam sooner rather than later. Villifying them on the internet adds fuel to the fire since the fundamentals of their movement require them to feel like outsiders making a dent in mainstream politics.

How bout a “Restoring Intelligence” rally ?

i didn’t see this as exploitative - unless you think that the old ‘give em enough rope’ saying counts. obviously, we’re not party to all the video shot, so very selective editing could be at play. i thought, though, that each person was given a lot of airtime, and that most of their statements were the standard types of stuff you hear everywhere from people who feel dispossessed. in the u.k, it’s the british national party who are doing the exact same thing.
the ‘small outsider as a voice of reason’ trope is ever present in right wing thought, sometimes combined with the ‘i’m an intellectual maverick who dare’s to think what others won’t’ - which is probably more of a british thing. certainly not much of that in evidence here.

I thought Reason TV did a interesting piece on the gathering..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CY5aFvRe2E&feature=player_embedded#!

Note the difference in tone…

Not that I am defending these people and their basic ideas, but you do have to take into account what I call the ‘microphone freeze effect.’  You cannot expect to get intelligence by walking up to people and putting microphones in their faces.  Even intelligent people tend to freeze and stumble over the simplest of concepts when put on the public spot like this. 

What would be dangerous would be finding the really intelligent people in the crowd who could tell you some of the real reasons Mr. Obama is not such a good president.  That would be interesting.  It’s easy to come up with reasons to despise Obama.  Here’s one: Obama is a bigot.  He opposes gay marriage.  There’s really nothing else one needs to know about this man.

Good luck getting that out of someone in Beck’s crowd!

But proving that there are ten dumb people in a crowd is not difficult and it is not interesting.

Go out and find the really smart son of a bitch that gives this kid a run for his microphone.  That’s what I want to watch.  There must have been one in the crowd somewhere.

+1 @ J Trip

What a bunch of fucking idiots. If you cannot back up your hateful claim with specific data, you need to shut your fat ass trap and get educated. I mean, really? Saying that you know something is True because your sister told you and she lives in Arizona is simply fucking ridiculous.  You cannot pray in the Lincoln Memorial? Really? What a load of crap.

Asserting that Obama is a Muslim and he is trying to destroy America and that he is a racist and that he does not believe in America says more about YOU that it does about him.

Get a fucking grip.

Wow!  I watched that whole thing and all I can say is:  That interviewer has a great profile.  He looks super cute.  I’m pretty sure I’d like to see him naked.

Oh yeah:  Dumb scared people are scary.

“I learned everything I needed to about Islam on 9/11.” Oh my god.

I love how the reporter very calmly asks them to elucidate, or cite, or explain, and most just stare like dumbfucks. Or repeat some catchphrase mantra they heard on TV. The guy going on about how we need to just enforce the laws we already have in order to stop immigration probably doesn’t know that illegally entering the country illegally is only a lowly misdemeanor, on par with jaywalking.

I don’t think I could do that, though. If I was interviewing them, I’d give them enough rope to hang their ignorant selves, but I couldn’t hold back correcting their obvious falsehoods.