Friday, January 22, 2010

Beck, Palin, Coulter

If you missed Glenn Beck’s trade-mark analysis yesterday of President Obama’s remarks that the Scott Brown victory in Massachusetts was “not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years, but what’s happened over the last eight years,” then you missed a great laugh.

Making me laugh is the one thing about Beck that draws me to watch him. He doesn’t make me cry, even though he makes himself cry. And he doesn’t make me want to renounce voting for Republicans and embrace populism. Nor does he make me scream at the TV, the way O’Reilly does.

But when Beck gets going on Obama’s advisers, his ridicule matches up perfectly with the ridiculousness of his targets.

Last week C. Edmund Wright at American Thinker was able to express my thoughts on Beck better than I could. Wright was making some observations about Sarah Palin’s first week as a Fox News contributor:
The number of times Beck led the conversation into a "there is no difference between the parties" (paraphrase) mode. Twice he made a pretty hard push to get Palin to disavow the GOP. This is consistent with Beck's shows, where he will cap off 55 minutes of fabulous exposé of Obama-appointed Marxists (and he is very very good at this) with an obligatory "but it's not a Democrat or Republican issue" disclaimer. It is an intellectual disconnect, and it threw Palin -- not expecting a hard debate -- off-guard a bit. She should have gone Ann Coulter on this point.
It is a disconnect that there’s no difference between the parties. Of course there’s a difference between the parties.

Not that I can imagine Sarah Palin “going Ann Coulter.”

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