Dream Speech: King, Beck & Landrieu

30 August 2010 |permalink | email article

Chris Wallace, host of “Fox News Sunday,” asked Glenn Beck some penetrating questions and got a few revealing answers in the wake of his infomercial rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made his “I have dream speech.” The pitch was a call for religious rebirth, but the unmistakable message for aggrieved Tea Party members was about “taking our country back.”

Admitting nobody made him the God Squad Beck said “most Christians would look on collective salvation as a perversion, but he’s a Mormon, so who is he to say what Christians say.” Asked “What are you?” Beck said he’s a dad and a “concerned citizen,” who took “one class in college,” and “didn’t know his butt from his elbow” before 9/11 happened, and then told people “to run for their lives.” As to what everyone is trying to tell “our leaders?” Beck has no idea. And he doesn’t want to be president.

Wallace wanted to ask a series of quick questions, but on the subject of his health since he got an eye diagnosis that hinted at some point he might have some health issues Beck rambled on in some long, incomprehensible recitation, with a doctor telling him at some point he might go blind. Beck is uninformed, a rabble-rousing entertainer perfect for Fox News.

On NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sen. Mary Landrieu (D –La.) injected a sense of sanity into Beck’s politics – or his theology. “(His) idea is not new…what he misses is that it’s not just talking it’s actual actions, it’s caring for the poor, it’s caring for the sick.”

Speaking about New Orleans, Landrieu said it’s using the power of government in a positive way, while criticizing Beck for saying that the city could be rebuilt by private effort alone (and) the government was terrible.

“Do you know how many houses all of the nonprofits have built? Not more than 5,000 in five years? You know how many we lost? 200,000…He is preaching a gospel that never existed…We follow the gospel of Jesus Christ, Mitch and I, and we know what to do.” (Her brother is New Orleans mayor.)

Quotable

“We have to restore the Lincoln Memorial’s honor? Has he been banging the Statue of Liberty again?” – Jon Stewart, referring to Beck’s rally on the same day and site of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream Speech” as “I Have a Scheme” speech.

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