Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America

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Amazon.com ReviewProduct Description_Washington Post _columnist Dana Milbank takes a fair and balanced look at the unsettling rise of the silly Fox News host Glenn Beck. Thomas Jefferson famously wrote that “the tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.” In America in 2010, Glenn Beck provides the very refreshment Jefferson had in mind: Whether he’s the patriot or the tyrant, he’s definitely full of manure. The wildly popular Fox News host with three million daily viewers perfectly captures the vitriol of our time and the fact-free state of our political culture. The secret to his success is his willingness to traffic in the fringe conspiracies and Internet hearsay that others wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole: death panels, government health insurance for dogs, FEMA concen­tration camps, an Obama security force like Hitler’s SS. But Beck, who is, according to a recent Gallup poll, admired by more Americans than the Pope, has nothing in his background that identifies him as an ideologue, giving rise to the speculation that his right-wing shtick is just that—the act of a brilliant showman, known for both his over-the-top daily out­rages and for weeping on the air. Milbank describes, with lacerating wit, just how the former shock jock without a college degree has managed to become the most recognizable leader of antigovernment conservatives and exposes him as the guy who is single-handedly giving patri­otism a bad name. From the Hardcover edition. Author Dana Milbank on Beck University As part of his $32-million-a-year business empire, Fox News host/radio show host/March on Washington demagogue Glenn Beck has begun offering on-line classes through “Beck University.” For an annual tuition of $74.95, and hundreds of perfectly good hours wasted, you will learn why everything they teach you at other universities is, as Beck puts it, “unbelievably incomplete” – because those schools, unlike Beck University, are constrained by annoyances such as facts. Alternatively, for much less money and pain, you can decline Beck University’s admission offer and buy this book. Consider it the Cliff’s Notes to Glenn Beck University: Everything you need to know about the most successful, and dangerous, media personality in America. I’d call it “Glenn Beck for Dummies,” but people might confuse it with Beck’s broadcasts.The Class Offerings:Chemistry 101: How Beck uses menthol paste to produce the famous tears that flow from his eyes.Economics 110: Beck describes himself as a “regular schmoe” who lives in a “subdivision,” then takes a chauffer-driven sedan to his 16-room mansion on three acres in the wealthiest hamlet in America: New Canaan, Connecticut.Economics 330: Beck’s apocalyptic pronouncements on air have made him a favorite of advertisers selling gold coins and “Survival Seed Banks” that can be used in the End Times.Religion 220: Beck’s advancement of the White Horse Prophecy, an obscure Mormon philosophy dating to the Prophet Joseph Smith, who said elders of the Mormon Church will save the Constitution.Biology 111: The saga of how Glenn Beck was almost killed by his hemorrhoids.Biology 330: The science behind Beck’s killing of a frog and restoring life to a dead fish on his Fox News set.Psychology 125: How to convince millions of people that the U.S. government is operating concentration camps in Wyoming.History 114: Beck’s discovery that progressives in America are using “the same tactic” Hitler did in “rounding up Jews and exterminating them.”History 220: Advanced Revisionism. Beck, fierce foe of government spending, once said of the Wall Street bailout: “the real story is the $700 billion that you’re hearing about now is not only, I believe, necessary, it is also not nearly enough, and all of the weasels in Washington know it.”Genealogy 401: Beck’s research determines that Woodrow Wilson is Obama’s grandfather.Enroll today. Because the End is Near.Review"[A] droll, take-no-prisoners account of the nation's most audacious conspiracy-spinner...Milbank is pitch-perfect in describing a typical Beck performance. He has watched and listened to more Beck programs than I believed possible for the human mind to absord...Milbank is also superb in describing how Beck manipulates his listeners..."-- David Oshinsky for _The Washington Post _"Train-wreck fascinating...Milbank's obsessions about Beck's obsessions can be contagious." -- _San Francisco Chronicle_"Milbank's fast-paced chronicle of Beck World ably details the meteoric rise of a low-rent radio shock jock to national phenomenon in less than a decade." _--The Christian Science Monitor _