Out At The Train Wreck Scene With A Notebook

Over at his new blogging digs at True Slant, Rolling Stone's political reporter Matt Taibbi discusses Glennsanity, Bachmanniac, and the carnival of stupid that is the right wing in 2009.

This must be a terrible time to be a right-winger. A vicious paradox has been thrust upon the once-ascendant conservatives. On the one hand they are out of power, and so must necessarily rail against the Obama administration. On the other hand they have to vilify, as dangerous anticapitalist activity, the grass-roots protests against the Geithner bailouts and the excess of companies like AIG. That leaves them with no recourse but to dream up wholesale lunacies along the lines of Glenn Beck’s recent “Fascism With a Happy Face” rants, which link the protesting “populists” and the Obama adminstration somehow and imagine them as one single nefarious, connected, ongoing effort to install a totalitarian regime.

This is not a simple rhetorical accomplishment. It requires serious mental gymnastics to describe the Obama administration — particularly the Obama administration of recent weeks, which has given away billions to Wall Street and bent over backwards to avoid nationalization and pursue a policy that preserves the private for-profit status of the bailed-out banks — as a militaristic dictatorship of anti-wealth, anti-private property forces. You have to somehow explain the Geithner/Paulson decisions to hand over trillions of taxpayer dollars to the rich bankers as the formal policy expression of progressive rage against the rich. Not easy. In order to pull off this argument, in fact, you have to grease the wheels with a lot of apocalyptic language and imagery, invoking as Beck did massive pictures of Stalin and Orwell and Mussolini (side by side with shots of Geithner, Obama and Bernanke), scenes of workers storming the Winter Palace interspersed with anti-AIG protests, etc. — and then maybe you have to add a crazy new twist, like switching from complaints of “socialism” to warnings of “fascism.” Rhetorically, this is the equivalent of trying to paint a picture by hurling huge handfuls of paint at the canvas. It’s desperate, last-ditch-ish behavior.

It’s been strange and kind of depressing to watch the conservative drift in this direction. In a way, actually, the Glenn Beck show has been drearily fascinating of late. It’s not often that we get to watch someone go insane on national television; trapped in an echo chamber of his own spiraling egomania, with apparently no one at his network willing to pull the plug and put him out of his misery, Beck has lately gone from being a mildly annoying media dingbat to a self-imagined messiah who looks like he’s shouldering more and more of the burdens of Christ with each passing day. And because he’s stepping into a vacuum of conservative leadership — there’s no one else out there who is offering real red meat to the winger crowd — he’s begun to attract not professional help but apostles, in the form of Chuck Norris (who believes we have to prepare for armed revolution and may prepare a run for “president of Texas”) and pinhead Midwestern congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, a woman who is looking more and more like George Foreman to Sarah Palin’s Joe Frazier in the Heavyweight Championship of Stupid. Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier!

Now I have to admit, Glenn Beck as The Evil Howard Beale isn't a new concept, but it's certainly one to pay attention to. But I don't think Beck is insane at all. I think he knows exactly what he's doing and he's doing it on purpose. He's a huge hit on FOX. They're more than willing to let him roll with the whole Messiah thing, just like Olbermann's Special Comments (Ben Affleck captured this perfectly as Olbermann on SNL) because they're good for ratings.

Glenn Beck is a very, very smart guy in fact. He went from an also-ran on CNN to FOX News's new golden boy, a cross of Olbermann's intensity, Steven Colbert's news-as-prop-comedy approach and Rachel Maddow's "gosh darn it" ordinary delivery. The combination however is something of a trinary explosive mixture.

Beck's problem is he's smart and he's crafty, but he's not taking responsibility for any of his antics. He knows by calling Obama a fascist, dumping on Bush, and pretending to be a champion of the people that he's a ratings monster going up against the largely discredited voices of the Right. His audience members are the Republicans who see the Bush era as a failure (after all, it led directly to the Obama Nation) and have a hard-on for the mass hysteria high of righteous indignation. They liked being in charge. They like playing the wounded victim lashing out even more. He's new, he's fresh, he's what they are looking for. But he's inflammatory as hell and he knows it, and nobody's reining him in over it. That makes him dangerous. Keep an eye on him.

Michele Bachmann, on the other hand, really is kind of depressingly, anti-intellectually stupid across the board. She's just something of a walking joke, really. She's just another dim bulb Republican know-nothing in the House, only meaningful through her self-parody value.