Beck Blew it

Glen Beck had a great opportunity last weekend and he blew it.  Sure he stood up in front of a couple of hundred thousand of is closest friends and made an absolutely self aggrandizing speech but because of the extensive media coverage he also had a terrific chance to explain to the other 13 million Americans, just what the Republican party or the Tea party or any of the right want to do with America. Glen Beck has managed, through the stupidity of his audience or his own insane megalomania to become a spokes person for the ultimate right. Here was a wonderful chance for him to tell the nation just what it is that the right plans to do if they get into power. We already know what they did the last time they got into power and only a moron wants that repeated so please Glen, tell us what your new plan is.

Of course he didn’t. He couldn’t.  Why, because there is no new plan. This time it seems that there is no plan at all. Obama is killing the country is not a plan. Every Republican who has been on Meet the Press in the last month has been asked the same question. “What programs would you cut to balance a tax cut so we don’t go further into debt?” Not one, Not Sessions, not Cornyn, not Boehner, not McConnell could come up with an answer and these clowns number among them the Republican leaders of both the House and the Senate. So it’s obvious that the Republicans don’t know what they want to do, they just know they want Obama out.

So what did good ole Glen Beck do? He held an old time revival meeting. He had them jumping up and down and singing the praises of that old time religion. He sang the praises of God, which is probably a good thing as long as you don’t depend on him to create an agenda for you. You see God is kind of a mystical being who doesn’t get out and do the nuts and bolts stuff a country needs to do to get off the schneid. Good ole Glen spoke of the Jews being led out of the desert five thousand years ago about the same time the Native Americans were appearing here. As he did that two Native Americans, a rabbi and a white preacher (what was he doing there?) appeared behind him out of the mist. It was nice theatrics but it didn’t mean squat.

Glen clamed that “When people come together of different faiths… the first thing they did was pray together.” Nice image but he spelled the principle word wrong. Not pray but prey, cause the first thing that people of different faiths have done historically, upon meeting each other is try to kill each other.

It seemed that Beck’s only crippled message was to look to God to solve our problems. This is the great cop out of the fundamentalist, right wing religionists and it solves as many problems as Bush did in New Orleans. I believe in God, I do, I just don’t see much evidence of him getting involved in the problems of man who he probably wishes he never created in the first place. And if I’m wrong and God does want to get involved in our problems there is probably a lot of stuff that takes precedence over getting Obama out of office, stuff like the genocide going on now in Somalia and Uganda, or how about a lot of earlier stuff he ignored like 6 million Jews, 10 million Russians, who knows how many Gypsy’s and Poles, or the million Laotians Pol Pot did in? No, I don’t really think we can make a case for God doing our work for us. Maybe if the Republicans really want to change things for the better instead of just getting a job in congress, maybe they should try real, real hard to come up with a plan on how to make the country better. And by the way, guys, stopping the country from functioning is not making it better.

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I have been getting a fair amount of backlash lately because of my penchant for referring to about half the country as brute stupid. I was beginning to think that maybe I should rethink that position but this week I was called to jury duty. They way they do this in New York is to send you a notice on which are instructions for what to do. Those instructions include the date you are supposed to report and the instruction to call the night before to verify the actual need for you to report on that date. This is in big bold letters so you won’t miss it. So last week I called the night before I was due and was told not to report on that date, the 23rd, but to report a week later on the 30th.

So on Monday the 30th I showed up in the jury room and the guy in charge of the jury picked up the microphone and announced that everyone who had the date Aug 30th as their reporting date on the jury duty notice should please rise and line up on the right side of the room. About half the 150 people in the room rose and lined up. The guy then announced that they had not called the night before or they would have known that they were not on call that day and he dismissed them. Half the people there to judge the guilt or innocence of another human being were too dumb to read the jury summons correctly.  That’s pretty scary. So during a break I asked the guy who ran the place if that was the way things normally went. He smiled and said, “why do you think I called them first. I knew that at least half the people in the room had showed up on the wrong day. Its that way all the time.”

Then to make matters worse I was in the initial group from which they would select a jury. I knew at once that I would not be picked as it was a copyright  trial and just they don’t make a lawyer dumb enough to pick a writer to serve on a copyright jury. What they did though was pick the eight least functional of the fourteen, venire men. Two of those selected spoke English so badly that the court stenographer couldn’t understand them and they couldn’t understand the judge’s instructions. One other lady who did speak English couldn’t read the questions on her form, a man selected seems like he had wandered in on his way to the fish market and so on and so on. Among those rejected were an architect, 2 teachers, an accountant and a lawyer.  Why do I say that half the people in this country are dumb? I just calls ‘em the way I sees ‘em.