I have to say that I didn’t bother following CPAC very much this year, but this evening I was out running errands and caught the very end on C-Span radio and it made me laugh out loud.
I had missed all of Glenn Beck’s talk. As I tuned to C-Span there was applause and then a C-Span announcer noted that Beck was signing his blackboard. The wrap-up music started and then stopped. A voice came on and was identified as uber-wingnut David Keene, who–among his many roles–is the Chair of the CPAC conference. He finally gets a mike and says of the blackboard signed by Beck:
“Every Wednesday in Washington all the Conservatives meet in Washington to decide what they should be doing in the week ahead: this is going to go to the site of the weekly meetings to remind us of what we should be doing in the weeks ahead and will be put it to use there.”
The Wednesday morning meeting at Grover Norquist’s front for grifters (AKA ATR) has been a conservative tradition since it began in 1993 to coordinate efforts to block HCR. It looks like Beck’s board will grace the room as the group meets this week to work on blocking HCR and any effort to make Government work again. CPAC has become a way for Norquist to demonstrate the power he has over the modern conservative movement. I thought it was funny to hear the conference end with an offering and a bow in Grover’s direction.
The scribblings of a mad carny gracing the digs of a grifter as he meets with his gang of theives. Somehow, it struck me as funny.
Cheers
dengre
ps: you can watch it at the 4:15:56 mark in this C-Span clip of the afternoon events at CPAC. I would bypass the rest if I were you (it is far better to kill your brain cells with a nice beverage than to do it by actually watching this mindless drivel). It would be great if somebody with the skills could post this bit on YouTube.
And yes, you should use this as an Open Thread…
Yutsano
P.T. Barnum, we hardly knew ye.
feebog
My Daddy went to CPAC, and all I got was this lousy chalkboard…
SenyorDave
And Jane Hamsher was in bed with this this shitbag Norquist. That alone she give her no credibility forever.
Comrade Kevin
@SenyorDave: are you trying to bait Just Some Fuckhead or something?
Senyordave
@SenyorDave: are you trying to bait Just Some Fuckhead or something?
I don’t even know who Just Some Fuckhead is, just saying that Norquist is truly an awful person. He’s so patently dishonest I have no idea if he believes his wingnut drivel. I think he’s in it for the money. But anyone who knowingly allies themself with him is tainted.
And Another Thing...
Fact checking Glenn Beck is a full time job for several unfortunates. Betcha didn’t know it’s called the progressive income tax ’cause Woodrow Wilson – King of the Progressives – got it passed. Or that Wilson forced prohibition on the country. (Wiki says he vetoed the bill.) There was absolutely nothing progressive abt my great grandmother who was a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Oh, and the mercury dime in 1916 started our national slide into fascism by putting the fasces on the dime. Beck is a dangerous snake oil salesman.
Ruckus
@Senyordave:
But anyone who knowingly allies themself with him is tainted.
Tainted is probably the nicest and one of the least disparaging adjectives that you could have used. I’m pretty sure it is not nearly strong enough.
Brick Oven Bill
Once was thinking about having Glenn do a taped personal introduction for a whack-job commercial for a start-up on the radio. This was less than two years ago.
Everybody should get a chance to tour local radio stations. These are modest places, and the sales managers chase you around for years after you have expressed the interest to spend a few hundred dollars.
Glenn’s price was something like $2000 for six months.
What impressed me was that the $9/hr secretary was on one-on-one terms with this guy. He talked with her on the phone. He did his own sales, unlike the others.
What a difference eighteen months can make. I should have paid the $2000. Perhaps Glenn would have made me the Secretary of Energy.
Heresiarch
I caught a fragment of Beck’s rant while I was at the gym (their TVs offered a choice between Fox News and a Ford informercial).
He was telling the audience how in many ways the Depression of 1920 was worse than the Depression of 1932, and how Coolidge’s tax cuts brought on the Roaring 20’s. Which is a good thing, I guess?
In case you think I am making this up:
http://www.rightpundits.com/?p=5629
Yutsano
@Heresiarch:
Mmm…I love the smell of history being rewritten in the morning.
Ian
Grover is among the worst. He knows his economic policies only benefit the wealthy, and he doesn’t give a damn.
Ian
@Heresiarch:
That entire reading of economic history is incorrect. The short lived 1920 depression was caused by the end of WW1 spending, the outbreak of Spanish Influenza, and the result economic disaster in post-war Europe. Presidents back then (and to a lesser extent this is still true) did not have massive powers over the economy. Blaming it on Woodrow Wilson is just an excuse to bash liberals and seeming like your making a good historical point.
Edit- not to say Wilson was a liberal. Just that he was a democrat, and Beck can’t tell the difference
Wag
Grover don’t surf!
Bob L
And I will bet not a eye lash in the room blinked.
Linkmeister
@Ian:
He is one of the wealthy!
soonergrunt
One wonders whether Jane will be seated at Grover’s right hand or at the other end of the table ?
darryl
@Bob L: He was considered a progressive, in the sense that he believed that rational analysts, such as engineers like himself, could find and excise waste, fraud, and abuse from the government, and make it more efficient.
…which is what the conservatives now claim for themselves.
It wasn’t that kind of policy that led to the Great Depression. It was largely a function of the bank deregulation in the 20’s. Kind of like how S&L deregulation in the early 80’s led to that crisis, and investment bank deregulation in the 90’s/00’s led to our present crisis.
The lesson from the last century is that bankers need to be prevented from doing the kind of risky shit they want to do.
hegemony57
If you listen very hard you can hear Glenn’s fingernails scratching their way across the chalkboard from Utah to DC.
You hear that Grover????
Grover. Are you listening?
bob h
Norquist’s “Starve the Beast” philosophy of shrinking government really has worked out for the nation, hasn’t it?
c u n d gulag
@Ian:
You’re right about the post WWI depression and influenza.
But the Spanish Flu also resulted in the increase in wages, hence the uptick in the economy. Employers were forced to pay higher wages because of the dearth of employees, and potential employees, for jobs.
Our problem now is that due to the glut of people out of work, or underemployed, employers can pay minimum, or minimal wages, and get away with it. I know, that’s the boat I’m in. A minimum wage job I hate, but I can’t complain. I have a job.
Michael
I turned down a personal invite to one of Grover’s meetings – they were trying to bring me into the fold back in 2002. He’s a creepy, chubby little fucker.
Michael
Somewhat OT, but I really enjoyed this diary at the GOS.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/2/20/839072/-Jonathan-Chait-on-the-coming-conservative-freak-out
I’d have chosen a different analogy – the end of “Caddyshack”, the judge and doctor dancing as the ball rests on the lip of the cup, with umpire Brian Doyle Murray watching it as it drops….
The crowd goes nuts, and the judge reacts in horror at the explosions all around.
Dennis G.
@Michael:
That would work. It was a great movie moment.
Annie
The “dumbing down of America,” courtesy of the Republican party.
Just saw a video of Andrew Breitbart on Salon. Now that is one sick and scary guy….
Toast
A few years ago I made a list of people whose graves I would like to take a piss on someday. Grover made the list.
fasteddie9318
I can only imagine the howling, shrieking apoplectic fit these same people would work themselves into if Olbermann or Maddow did the same thing at some liberal convention.
licensed to kill time
Gosh, I hope Beck’s blackboard doesn’t get accidentally erased or those conservatives won’t know what to do in the weeks ahead!
This reminds me of when I was in grade school and the local tv weather/science guy “Dr. Fishback” came in to our classroom and gave a talk. He signed the blackboard with his signature cartoon (fish + back, you can imagine it) and we carefully erased around it for weeks, until some clueless kid wiped it off one day and we were all verklempt.
Jennifer
More deep wisdom from Beck, courtesy of WaPo, via Sadly, No!:
I’m willing to bet that no one in the room, least of all Glen Beck himself, realize that he made a case for allowing South American drug cartels to ply their trade in the US unhindered and unmolested by the law. Because, after all, insisting that people gain their fortunes through legal means (honorably obtained), don’t use the money to have police, politicians, and judges assassinated (well used), and not create a bunch of junkies (benefit to the community) is “big government”, “socialist utopia”, and “a cancer” – as well as an intolerable impediment to the Free Hand™.
Why, looking at our current drug policy, it’s almost as if people in this country have failed to realize that God loves the drug lords more than them. That’s why He gave them all that money, right?