First, let me say that I despise Glenn Beck, won’t watch him, won’t listen to him, don’t want to know him, let alone follow him: while he may be a Tea Party/Fox News darling, I think he is bad news for the conservative movement and uses pure hokum to advance himself, as any huckster would.
Beck is, as I have said previously, a self-admitted “nutcase” (an acknowledged “alcoholic,” he was recently admitted to who-knows-where for an unknown “medical” malady). His “rally” was ill planned (come on: he didn’t know it was on the same day as the Martin Luther King rally, even though King’s niece was scheduled to be there?) and only gave the wacked-out hosts on MSNBC and Comedy Central fodder, causing them to try to one-up Beck with their own pathetic rally. All of these so-called rallies make the classic anti-war rally, the Vietnam Moratorium, which I attended as a 14-year-old after returning home from Woodstock, shine.
Yeah, Beck’s a nutcase, but so are Ed Shultz, Bill O’Reilly, Keith Olbermann and Jon Stewart. Anybody who refers to the President of the United States as “dude” to his face is a nutcase, but no more than any POTUS who allows such a slight to go unanswered. I’m certain the late, great Ronald Reagan, a man who would not take off his suit jacket in the Oval Office, is rolling over in his grave.
Glenn Beck’s rally tried to be serious to the point of being funny, while Stewart’s, Colbert’s and Shultz’s rallies tried to be funny but were seriously mean if not sick. The best way to describe the theme of the “Rally for Sanity and/or Fear” is, well, The Daily Caller is a family-friendly website, so it won’t allow me to fully express myself, but suffice it to say, it was all about “F-you.”
“F-You,” you crazed Tea Party people, you mean-spirited, corporate-loving Republicans, you Obama-hating weirdos, you birthers, you, well, regular fly-over-country Americans. “F-You”: we’re just as much Americans as you are!
No, they aren’t: the people attending the Stewart/Colbert rally frigging hate the aforementioned Americans, if not America itself. They think they should all be banished, like Helen Thomas said of “the Jews,” back to Germany and Poland, where they all came from after all.
No, the rally that clogged the Metro, had WTOP as well C-SPAN radio swooning (WTOP beckoned listeners, “Are you going to the rally?” while C-SPAN’s voice-over commentator could barely contain herself from giggling at Stewart’s jokes), kept bus drivers busy shuttling liberals back and forth from New York City on Arianna Huffington’s dime, and hopefully did not leave the same amount of trash that Obama’s inauguration and Shultz’s brown shirts did.
Like Jon Stewart, these people were all about themselves and their hatred for America. Me, my, I: that’s what we’re interested in, nothing serious, nothing substantial, nothing positive. No solutions for any of America’s serious problems were put forth by anyone, just “We are Americans, too.” It was really the Rally to Mock America.
One sign shown at the beginning of the rally by C-SPAN (since liberals are so hung-up on signs at Tea Party rallies) said: “I’m Pretty Much Cool With The Reasonable Amount Of Taxes I Currently Pay, I’d Probably Be Okay With Paying More Too If That Might Help The Economy With The Deficit.” “Help the economy with the deficit”: oh my, how Keynesian. That sign is as frigging outrageous as any Tea Party sign, except most Tea Partiers actually pay federal income taxes whereas I would imagine that the person holding this sign is among the 45% of Americans who pay no federal income taxes.
Stewart and Colbert, like Beck and Shultz, are entertainers, not legitimate members of the “media”: they put on a very professional show, a “party,” parts of which, in between the meanness, had me, like the C-SPAN lady, laughing. It was like Woodstock without Jimi Hendrix and brown acid. But once the laughs end, once these environmentalists, these all-American “progressives,” these MSNBC/Comedy Central/SNL/Real-Housewives-of-DC watchers, these Obama voters left our sacred Washington Mall, I hope they picked up their own trash rather than have the government-paid National Park Service do so, because there sure was a whole lot of it spewed from the stage.
Nicholas Thimmesch II, son of the late Los Angeles Times columnist Nick Thimmesch, is a longtime media and communications consultant to numerous campaigns, government representatives and public policy organizations, serving in the Reagan White House as a staff writer.