Confounding Fathers

[heliochrome85]

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010 ... table=true

For me, The New Yorker is up there with the Christian Science Monitor, The Economist, and The Atlantic Monthly, in terms of quality of writing, and quality of reporting.

[96Qowner]

I love The New Yorker because the articles are nice and long. But this one ... um ... I had already read it on RCP and, frankly, I didn't really get it. What did you take away from it? What was the point?

[heliochrome85]

The John Birch Society was one of the decade’s most controversial right-wing organizations. Founded in 1958 by Robert Welch, a candy manufacturer from Massachusetts, the society took its name from a Baptist missionary and military-intelligence officer killed by Communist Chinese forces in 1945, whom Welch called the first American casualty of the Cold War. The group was founded at a propitious time. After Senator Joseph McCarthy’s fall, in 1954, many of McCarthy’s followers felt bereft of a voice, and Welch seemed to speak for them; by the mid-sixties, his society’s membership was estimated to be as high as a hundred thousand. Welch, exploiting fears of what McCarthy had called an “immense” domestic conspiracy, declared that the federal government had already fallen into the Communists’ clutches. In a tract titled “The Politician,” he attacked President Dwight D. Eisenhower as “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy” who had been serving the plot “all of his adult life.” Late in 1961, after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, he accused the Kennedy Administration of “helping the Communists everywhere in the world while pretending to do the opposite.”

Wherever he looked, Welch saw Communist forces manipulating American economic and foreign policy on behalf of totalitarianism. But within the United States, he believed, the subversion had actually begun years before the Bolshevik Revolution. Conflating modern liberalism and totalitarianism, Welch described government as “always and inevitably an enemy of individual freedom.” Consequently, he charged, the Progressive era, which expanded the federal government’s role in curbing social and economic ills, was a dire period in our history, and Woodrow Wilson “more than any other one man started this nation on its present road to totalitarianism.”

Sound familiar? Beck has been cribbing his notes from Robert Welch. Shocking.

[dusred]

Sound familiar? Beck has been cribbing his notes from Robert Welch. Shocking.

When did you start watching Beck?

[96Qowner]

Sound familiar? Beck has been cribbing his notes from Robert Welch. Shocking.

It's a Beck attack piece? ... Oh.

So ... according to The New Yorker piece, if you deride President Wilson and Progressives ... you're just like a Bircher? Seriously??? That's it? That's what the article is about? That's just too convoluted and too many words for such a vapid attempt at a smear. There must be more to it than that.

[AZhitman]

Methinks someone is digging in wet sand with a colander.

Next.

[heliochrome85]

Sound familiar? Beck has been cribbing his notes from Robert Welch. Shocking.

When did you start watching Beck?

i grew up and lived in a very conservative part of a very conservative state. ive known about beck for years, back before he got his CNN gig, and later his FoxNews gig. not to mention, i read the news. ive previously linked to foxnews, so i obviously read their page as well.

[heliochrome85]

Sound familiar? Beck has been cribbing his notes from Robert Welch. Shocking.

It's a Beck atttack piece? ... Oh.

So ... according to The New Yorker piece, if you deride President Wilson and Progressives ... you're just like a Bircher? Seriously??? That's it? That's what the article is about? That's just too convoluted and too many words for such a vapid attempt at a smear. There must be more to it than that.

i duly apologize for testing your reading comprehension skills.

[IBCoupe]

96Q, it's the way he attacks Wilson and Progressives. From the article:

Part of Beck’s allure is the promise that he will reveal secret information. In one segment last year, he produced a drawing of fasces—which he described, anachronistically, as “the Roman symbol of Fascism”—and then a picture of an old Mercury dime, with fasces on the reverse side. “Who brought this dime in? It happened in 1916—Woodrow Wilson was the President,” he said. “We’ve been on the road to Fascism for a while.” Benito Mussolini, of course, didn’t adopt the ancient symbol of authority as the Fascist emblem until the nineteen-twenties; the designer of the coin, the sculptor Adolph A. Weinman, intended it to signify the nation’s military preparedness, and paired it with an olive branch to illustrate the desire for peace.

Beck’s readings of Progressive-era politics are nearly as bizarre. Whatever can be said about Theodore Roosevelt, he was not a crypto-radical. It was Roosevelt who coined the term “lunatic fringe” to describe the extreme leftists of his day, and his concept of New Nationalism—in which an activist government built a vibrant capitalism, partly by regulating big business—looked back to Alexander Hamilton, not Karl Marx. Nor was Wilson a Bolshevik; in fact, in 1917 he sent American troops to Russia to support the anti-Bolshevik White Army. At home, his reforms sought to break up monopolies in order to restore competition among small companies. “If America is not to have free enterprise,” Wilson declared, “then she can have no freedom of any sort whatever.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010 ... 2hqZpcpu'q

[96Qowner]

So it IS just a Beck attack piece.

Hurrah for The New Yorker. I'm fascinated that Sean Wilentz and The New Yorker think Beck is "bizarre". What a surprise. How interesting. Who's Sean Wilentz? Here's his Wiki page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Wilentz

*snore*

At least he's no blind follower of the marvelous anointed one.

[dusred]

At least he's no blind follower of the marvelous anointed one.

You do realize Beck is going blind don't you? I thought that was a cute unintended pun.

[96Qowner]

LOL, I forgot, heheh, no pun intended.

[heliochrome85]

So it IS just a Beck atttack piece.

Hurrah for The New Yorker. I'm fascinated that Sean Wilentz and The New Yorker think Beck is "bizarre". What a surprise. How interesting. Who's Sean Wilentz? Here's his Wiki page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Wilentz

*snore*

At least he's no blind follower of the marvelous anointed one.

yes i guess reading the work of an educated and intelligent man would be a change now wouldn't it?

[Cold_Zero]

i grew up and lived in a very conservative part of a very conservative state. ive known about beck for years, back before he got his CNN gig, and later his FoxNews gig. not to mention, i read the news. ive previously linked to foxnews, so i obviously read their page as well.

I aol have to read the article in the morning. Can't read big long aticles on this phone. Your comment cracked me up. I never thought of the Fort or northern IN as the great bastion of conservativism.

[heliochrome85]

we dont have a democratic party office. its a mall kiosk. which if you think about it, is fairly appropriate.

[96Qowner]

So it IS just a Beck atttack piece.

Hurrah for The New Yorker. I'm fascinated that Sean Wilentz and The New Yorker think Beck is "bizarre". What a surprise. How interesting. Who's Sean Wilentz? Here's his Wiki page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Wilentz

*snore*

At least he's no blind follower of the marvelous anointed one.

yes i guess reading the work of an educated and intelligent man would be a change now wouldn't it?

Yeah, I confess, I haven't read any of Beck's books. I get a kick out of listening to him, though, so I guess that's close. Or did you mean that other guy, whatshisname?

[AZhitman]

Beck can't possibly be intelligent, or well-read.

After all, he's a critic of the Anointed One and an enemy of the Prognuts.

[AZhitman]

Beck can't possibly be intelligent, or well-read.

After all, he's a critic of the Anointed One and an enemy of the Prognuts.

[heliochrome85]

well, also, it doesnt help that he is wrong almost all of the time. someone who has opened one of the few books he repetedly references, would at least get some of the things he says right.