Inspiration We Don't Need

[talon]

I believe people like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and even Sarah Palin are no longer watchdogs of American politics, but have become, instead, rabid attackers of the very things they once espoused. I don't know when their talk shows changed from being inspirational, informative, and constructive to inciting hatred and violence towards other Americans and employing scare tactics against their own listeners to encourage them in acts of violence and hatred, but so it has. They no longer make sense, and they re-define words and phrases to mean what they want them to mean.

They accuse Americans of operating under "code words" and yet they have a plethora of them for their own follower/sycophants- such as defining "social reform" when applied to anyone outside their limited circle of sycophants to mean "communist", yet when applied to their circle of sycophants it means "good Christian charity".

"Charity" of course has an altogether different definition among Beck's and Limbaugh's" Dittoheads " than it does for the editors of assorted dictionaries. We define "charity" as "assisting those who need help" and they seem to define charity as "assisting only those who pledge to convert to our beliefs through words, deeds, and repay us with interest because we have to make a profit somehow ."

Beck ran a 14 month campaign against the health reform bill, not with any cogent arguments against it but with hate-filled rhetoric and precious few facts, apparently just because it was proposed by Obama. There were plenty of valid reasons to oppose this health reform bill and Glenn Beck didn't - as far as I've been able to tell sorting through his diatribes - raise a single one of those valid arguments. Three years ago, I could have counted on him to have analyzed the bill, found the flaws, and reported on that with passion. Now, his passion has turned to vitriol, and his remaining followers are angry, ill-informed, confused, and prone to acting upon his hate speech.

Most of Limbaugh's and Beck's speeches are no longer passionate. They no longer inspire reform or social improvement or provide government checks, but instead incite generalized bigotry, narrow-mindedness, and blood-lust. Most of this malignity lacks a focused target, aimed generally toward anyone who displays any deviation from a very narrow set of characteristics. When it is targeted, the violence and anger are ramped up towards the person or group of people Beck has chosen to hate that day/week. Is it any wonder that their listeners may be inspired to commit acts of violence and hatred towards Beck's targets?