Glenn Beck and his ilk in fact created Donald Trump
The inconvenient truth for Glenn Beck is that there are times when people start taking the bile he spills to heart. That gives the likes of Donald Trump an opening. His exchange with CNN’s Chris Cuomo was probative.
Glenn Beck told Cuomo that he really believes that Donald Trump is a very dangerous man. When asked to elaborate, he did not let up. He reminded Cuomo that Trump made a comment that he could go onto Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and not lose a single vote. He then mentioned Trump joking about Putin killing reporters.
Glenn Beck should remember that when pointing a finger, there are four fingers pointing back. Someone might remind him of his own comments about shooting someone in the head. The vile rhetoric has been modus operandi for the Right during the last several years.
Cuomo asked Glenn Beck if he may be misjudging the mood of the country after his continued Trump excoriation. Beck’s response?
“I am not here to talk about the mood of the country,” Beck said. “I am hear to talk about the constitution and what I believe is an absolute right or wrong. We don’t change with the mood of the country. That is the problem with our country right now.”
Beck went on to give his standard pro constitution self-righteous diatribe as he sees it. “You never make a decision when you are angry,” Beck said.
That is actually true. But one should note that we have the Congress we have because of the manufactured anger created by Beck and his ilk on issues anathema to the country’s real problems. They kept many American eyes off of the real problems.
The real anger in this country should be for issues that affect us for real. We should be angry about low wages. We should be angry about Wall Street pilfering us all. We should be angry about politicians who simply support policies for the wealthy or the corporatocracy. We should be angry about a justice system that incarcerates people to feed the profits of the prison industrial complex. We should be angry about a defense budget that build stuff to destroy stuff or build stuff that will never be used. We should be angry that a mother cannot spend the necessary time with her kid after birth. We should be angry that an investor sitting on his butt pays less taxes than a man working his butt off. We should be angry that the sacrifice of capital is deemed more important than the sacrifice of family, limb, or life.
I could go on and on. The problem is that none of these issues get much mention on the Right. Chris then tells Glenn Beck something he did not want to hear.
“But here is the thing,” Chris Cuomo said. “Is there a little bit of ‘reap what you sow’ in some of this with the GOP that engendering an oppositional mode towards government, in ratcheting up negativity as a mainline discourse, you wound up somewhat birthing Donald Trump? And now some of those people who were angry about what was going on and telling people to be angry, now they’ve got somebody who is harnessing the power of exactly that, and you are disappointed.”
What a choice of words, birthing Donald Trump. Beck said he is not disappointed. He said he warned against it. Really?