The real question is why any sane and thoughtful person should give the slightest attention, much less credence, to an ignorant, self-important, demagogic pimple like Glenn Beck.

He’s just another blithering jackass infotainwhore employed by a devolved and decadent corporate media.

One is reminded of Dan Quayle’s courageous attack on then-popular teevee sitcom character Murphy Brown for her flagrant and scandalous flouting of Amerikan Family Values.  The infotainment industry exists to enchant and enthrall unwary and stupid citizens into a permanently surrealistic and numbed state of mind.  Incapable of independent critical thinking, Beck-heads make do with a quiver of talking points and cookie-cutter, cliché-ridden scripts.

Notice that over the past several years, prime-time teevee has become obsessed with blurring the boundary between teevee and “real life”, notably by pumping out euphemistically-named “reality shows”.

Which is entirely consistent with a time-serving hack like Beck—praised by media executives and critics as an “outstanding communicator”, as his ilk typically are—resorting to touting a preposterous fictional teevee character as an authority for his weak and untenable position.

No offense to material handlers, but in even a slightly more perfect world, Beck would at best earn a reputation as the smartest guy on the loading dock—or the corner taproom.

Beck and Co. confuse our complex reality with material that was written in Hollywood to sell commercial air time. Beck is an intellectual fraud. One more reason to leave the TV off.

That FOX “News” seriously cites a FOX network TV Drama…
That viewers blur the line between real and reality TV…
That Glenn Beck even HAS an audience…

All this speaks to one fatal flaw in our news delivery system: “Corporate News Media.” Please, please understand that it is NOT the aim of Corporate News Media’s to inform or educate the public. Their aim is to ENTERTAIN the public. You entertain and you gain market share. You gain market share and you can charge more to advertisers. You charge more to advertisers and you make more money for your stockholders.

Until we modify the news delivery system and separate it from commercial interests, we here at Truthdig and elsewhere will continue to be viewed by the mainstream, dumb-downed electorate as alarmist, flag-hating, Bush-bashing, left-wing, wackos.

Until we modify the news delivery system and separate it from commercial interests jerks like Glenn Beck will continue to entertain by blurring the lines between fact and fantasy.

Oh, by the way, I shouldn’t leave this discussion without taking a shot at the creature known as Glenn Beck.

Have you ever tried to listen to this nitwit on the radio? It’s like listening to a junior high school student trying to show everyone how smart he is—yet failing miserably. It’s embarrassing.

Whenever he’s had on a guest who discusses torture, he goes all giddy on us. Like a junior high student who’s just had his first look at pornography, and is all titillated about it. You can hear his excitement about the subject. You can hear how he wants to laud torturers as heroes. God, it makes me want to puke all over the radio.

He once took a call from a guy who claimed to be a torturer at Guantanamo (it may have been faked, but that’s not the point). Beck fell all over the guy, praising him for being true to his country. Praising him for going to extremes to fight the evildoers. All accompanied by that giddy, adolescent chuckling—the same type of chuckling you would hear from a thirteen-year-old looking at his first naked girly pics.

Are you ready to hurl yet?

If not, tune in to Glenn Beck’s radio show. It’s a tough assignment. He is so puerile, so adolescent, that you want to hit the radio with a baseball bat.

I swear, this guy is one sick puppy.

Paolo: Bush and company “just knew” there were WMDs in Iraq. That turned out okay. Didn’t it? Misssion accomplished. Right? (Yes, I’m being sarcastic.) Ypu know what they say about your heart being in the right place? The road to hell is paved with good intentions. America is leaving good intentions all over the place.

There is a certain type of semantic game that goes on with people who want to justify the unjustifiable. The game consists of inventing some outlandish situation, almost impossible to envision happening in real life, that will somehow justify an obviously immoral action.

There are semi-plausible grounds for this. For example, we generally agree it is wrong to steal someone else’s property. However, if you see a person drowning in the middle of a lake, the law says it is okay to steal that boat on the pier in order to save the drowning person.

This is a far cry, however, from the tales invented in the feverish minds of Fox TV to justify torture. “What if you [somehow] just KNEW that a person was planning to bomb a bus? Wouldn’t it be okay to torture the person to find out which bus?”

The logical fallacies here are obvious. First of all, the person being tortured would most likely just make something up to stop the torture just long enough for the bomb to go off. Second, what if what you “just knew” turned out to be wrong? Should you still be belligerently proud that you tortured, because your heart was in the right place? I’m sure there are other fallacies also. But the point is, torture almost never yields good, accurate information. It yields confessions, which are the tools of tyrants.

Note how Zarqawi “confessed” to his crimes under torture. What good did this coerced “confession” do us?

The emotional attachment that right-wingers have for torture and lawlessness suggests something else is going on.  They seem to be driven as much by sadistic impulses as anything else.

The question that always throws them is when they are asked whether torture of American troops by foreigners would be acceptable.

screamingpalm: Why would you give them that idea for free? I’m sure they hate themselves for not thinking of that first!

Scary times we live in. I have been noticing a very hawkish trend in Hollywood lately.

I suppose the next “Fox and Friends” will cite “Batman: The Dark Knight” to defend the use of wiretapping and spying on Americans.