Glenn Beck Is All Confused By Markos Calling Out Tea Partiers For Eliminationist Rhetoric. Imagine That.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

The other day, our friend Markos went on Countdown and called out Glenn Beck and his fellow teabaggers for their incessant use of eliminationist rhetoric.

Of course, this deeply upset Glenn Beck, who responded on his show yesterday (transcript via Jed):

I want to start in an unusual place. I want to show you what the founder of the Daily Kos, which is this far-left wing blog, said. Here's what he said just the other day about tea parties:

This is what the people voted for, and it's one thing to oppose it on policy, it's another thing to use the kind of exterminationist, eliminationist rhetoric that they're using in appealing to violence and that sort of thing.

OK. Extermination talk? I haven't heard any of the extermination talk. It sounds like, again, he's calling us Nazis. How can you paint the right like Nazis?

Maybe Glenn Beck hasn't heard any eliminationist rhetoric because he's one of the loudest voices using it, and doing so on a regular basis:



As I noted awhile back:

Beck actually has been engaging in eliminationist rhetoric in attacking progressives since June of last year, though he's been recently ratcheting it down to new depths.

I compiled the video above with a sampling from the past nine months. In it, you can see Beck call progressives a "cancer" (multiple times), "the disease that's killing us," a "virus," a "parasite," "vampires" who will "suck the life out" of the Democratic Party, and claim that progressives intend the "destruction of the Constitution" and will strike it a "death blow".

Since then, we've been treated to such disquisitions as this:

Beck: What they're about to pass is not a tumor. Because the doctor can come over here and say, 'Yeah, there's a tumor here, and we've got to go in and cut this out.' I don't know if you can cut this tumor out. Maybe not. But you can try. But what they're about to pass is a bloodstream disease. It will be injected into our system and it will be incurable.

Beck: I think they're gonna pass this thing. They are gonna do whatever it takes to pass this, and they're not going to go the traditional way, they are gonna go the way of snakes and cockroaches. They're gonna crawl out in the cover of darkness, and they're going to pass this, make it happen one way or another.

Apparently, though, Beck is confused about just what Markos meant, because of course he couldn't be talking about people like Beck. Somehow, it has to do with Beck's Planet Bizarro-style confusion about political categories -- as in Beck's reconfiguration of things to equate neo-Nazis with the "Progressive Right":

Actually, when I heard this, I thought "wow, this guy, I mean he proves my point." He's right -- if, if you say, those people with George Bush, they thought he was okay and they didn't do anything about it. He's right if that's really what you thought about George W. Bush and you were wide awake, because then you'd be part of the progressive movement, and that makes my point on the railroad tracks.

...

We've disregarded the railroad, the rails of the rule of law of the Constitution, and equal justice, and then taken our foundation -- faith, hope, charity, self-reliance, accountability -- and replaced it with structure, socialism.

It's what ties the communists and the national socialists -- the Nazis -- together. They disagree with each other, but that's only because they want control, and these guys want control.

It's exactly what the Daily Kos guy said. "They didn't have a problem with it before because George Bush was doing it."

But wait, wait, wait. You don't have a problem with it now? Why?

Actually, what Markos said was that the Tea Partiers didn't have a problem with Big Government when George W. Bush was doing it -- they just object when it's a Democrat in power.

And that's as true of Glenn Beck as anyone. He claims now that he criticized Bush for his budgets, but the reality is that he did so rarely and it was always muted criticism. He certainly didn't organize mass rallies to oppose his every move, did he?

But of course, now, NOW Beck has seen the light: Bush was actually a "Progressive Republican."
And didn't he just equate neo-Nazis with the "Progressive Right"?

So in other words, Bush was actually the same thing as a neo-Nazi?

But wait -- don't Beck and his Fox cohorts (see Brit Hume and Bill O'Reilly most recently) regularly complain that "the Left" (whoever that was) constantly smeared Bush by calling him a Nazi?

It's all very confused, isn't it? Or is "insane" perhaps a better word?