The hardworking staff at Campaign Outsider is not on this earth long enough to jump into the news media’s reconstruction/deconstruction of Fox Newshound Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honorpalooza in Washington, D.C. Saturday.
(Abandon all hope ye who enter here.)
But we will weigh in on the run-up to the Beckorama. And just to get the Tea flowing, the views expressed here all come from Saturday’s New York Times.
A piece headlined “Where Dr. King Stood, Tea Party Claims His Mantle” quotes Beck thusly about his rally’s occurring on the date and in the place where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963:
On his radio show, Mr. Beck said he had not intended to choose the anniversary for his “Restoring Honor” rally on Saturday but had since decided it was “divine providence.”
Dr. King’s dream, he told listeners, “has been so corrupted.”
“Judge a man by the content of his character?” he said. “Character doesn’t even matter in this country. It’s time we picked back up the job.”
He later added: “We are the people of the civil rights movement. We are the ones that must stand for civil and equal rights, justice, equal justice. Not special justice, not social justice. We are the inheritors and protectors of the civil rights movement. They are perverting it.”
A Beck-and-Call acolyte also weighed in:
Lloyd Marcus, a black singer who has performed on the cross-country tours of the Tea Party Express, often introduces himself by saying, “I am not an African-American, I am a Lloyd Marcus American!”
In a letter posted Friday on the social networking Web site Tea Party Nation, Mr. Marcus wrote, “Glenn Beck’s values and principles are far more consistent with M.L.K.’s values than the black civil rights leaders who have sold their souls to the anti-God, anti-family and anti-America progressives for political power.” He signed it, “Lloyd Marcus, unhyphenated American.”
Rebuttal came in the form of Charles M. Blow’s Times op-ed on Saturday.
Nut graf:
Glenn Beck is the anti-King.
Beck-and-Call-and-Response:
Beck has said of this rally, “This is a moment, quite honestly, that I think we reclaim the civil rights movement.” Reclaim? From whom?
Beck wants to swaddle his movement in the cloth of the civil rights movement, a cloth soaked in the blood and tears of the innocent and oppressed, a cloth his divisiveness and self-aggrandizing threatens to defile.
In fact, to even insinuate that the president’s policies are in any way equivalent to the brutality of the Jim Crow South at the time of the civil rights movement is the highest order of insult, particularly to those who lived and suffered through it, as well as to those who live with its legacy. If Beck truly thinks these movements are comparable, I have some pictures of “strange fruit” I’d like for him to see.
Divine providence? Strange fruit?
You be the judge of this improbable connection between two very different dreams.
From a Deval Patrick campaign press release headlined, “FIVE THINGS REPUBLICAN CHARLES BAKER WON’T TELL YOU ABOUT HIS RECORD ON PROPERTY TAXES.”
Campaign Outsider 