Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America (13 page)

“It’s not funny. It’s not even close to funny,” he responded on a later show.

Beck got out his red hotline—the one for which only the White House supposedly has the number. Dunn, he alleged, is one of a few White House officials who “worship Chairman Mao.” By way of proof, he added: “Just call me if you don’t have an altar in your bedroom.” The phone didn’t ring—it was true!

Beck liked this form of proof. “They won’t challenge—they won’t call me!” he exulted with his red phone on the set. “Communists, revolutionaries, socialists, Marxists, followers of Chairman Mao appointed by Obama to the executive branch in positions of the government—call, call me! Explain it, explain it any other way.”

Before and after Dunn left the White House (she was there on a temporary basis for the first months of the Obama presidency), Beck continued to mau-mau the Maoists (sometimes even accompanied by photographs of executions and child labor in China): “Mao-loving Anita Dunn … one of her favorite political philosophers is Mao … the Mao fan, Anita Dunn … preaching the virtues of Mao … The Chairman Mao–lover, lizard lady, Anita Dunn … a follower of Mao … singing the praises of Chairman Mao … Every time I see an interview with her I wait for her tongue to come out. She’s spooky. I expect, like, lasers to shoot out of her eyes.”

* * *

In fairness, Beck doesn’t claim that everybody who works for Obama is a communist. Some of them are fascists. One night, he discussed Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, then added: “I’m going to show you the beginning of something that should scare the living daylights out of you. It is propaganda in America.”

The conservative Web site
Breitbart.com
had posted a recording of a teleconference in which the communications director for the National Endowment for the Arts, Yosi Sergant, seemed to be encouraging artists to produce work that supports the Obama volunteer-service agenda.

Sergant, who during the campaign popularized the iconic “Hope” image of Obama, said on the call: “I would encourage you to pick something, whether it’s health care, education, the environment. There are four key areas that the corporation has identified as the areas of service.”

Beck interviewed the man who recorded the teleconference. The charges caused an uproar on Capitol Hill, and within days Sergant was gone. “We played the tapes of the call with Yosi Sergant,” Beck celebrated, “and Yosi Sergant had to step down.”

But after a year and a half of hunting, Beck had only two scalps to show for his efforts, the relatively minor figures of Sergant and Jones. He began to cast his net wider. One night he went after a Canadian named Maurice Strong, who works with the United Nations. “I need videos and anything you can find on Maurice Strong and you send it to us right away,” he told his watchdogs. Beckoning to his White House hotline, he said, “The reason why this phone is not ringing now is because there are phone calls being made and they are scouring the Internet. They are sanitizing and taking it all off.”

That was a bit obscure, but Beck was out of good targets. He finally settled on exposing people who had not yet been appointed by Obama. “You mark my words,” he said after Justice John Paul Stevens announced his retirement from the Supreme Court. “A radical is coming. Sotomayor, I’m sorry, gang, but she’s a radical. He’s going to pick another radical. I mean, if he’s smart, he will find a gay, handicapped, black woman who’s an immigrant. She could say, ‘I hate America, I want to destroy America,’ and that way they’ll only be able to say, ‘Why do you hate gay, immigrant, black, handicapped women?’ ”

Not only was Beck a first-rate communist hunter, but he was also a clairvoyant: The nominee had yet to be named, but Beck already knew she wanted to destroy America.

And, sure enough, he was right. Just a few days after Elena Kagan was nominated, Beck reported that “Kagan happens to be a big fan of Cass Sunstein … who I maintain is the most dangerous man in America, okay?”

This can only mean one thing: Kagan, too, wants dogs to sue their owners.

CHAPTER 11
HEY, KIDS, LET’S PUT ON A SHOW!

Glenn Beck was burning mad.

He was mad that President Obama was making nice to Somali pirates. “They’re sending over a hostage negotiator. Yes, I hope we’re bringing them some hot cocoa.” (Navy snipers shot the pirates dead and freed their captive unharmed.)

Beck was also burning mad that the economy was improving—after President Obama’s stimulus bill had taken effect. Damn! “Retailers saw a better than expected number today,” he reported. “Stores including Walmart, Target, and Costco expect to boost their sales for April. Due to Easter,” he added, to make clear it was Jesus’ doing, not Obama’s.

And Beck was really, really, really mad that Obama dared to say he’d like to see immigration reforms taken up by Congress. Slurring like a drunk, Beck mocked Obama: “I’m pretty much done, not a lot more to do, you know. I got all those things done. You know, why don’t I work on immigration reform?”

This drove Beck to the point of … televised arson.

“Maybe I’m alone,” he continued, “but I think it would be just faster if they just shot me in the head.” Like a Somali pirate, perhaps. “You know what I mean? How much more can—how much more can he disenfranchise all of us?”

With that, Beck introduced his guest—Bill Schulz from Fox’s
Red Eye
program—and then, picking up a large red gas can, proceeded to pour the contents on Schulz. With each dousing from the can, he called out Obama’s sins, the way Jews, during the Passover seder, recite the ten plagues that were visited on Egypt.

“Let’s say Bill is the average American here and I’m President Obama. This is the way I feel.”

“The only fat they cut out is national defense!” (Obama’s budget had the largest Pentagon allocation in history.)

“We have growing Social Security. We have Medicare, Medicaid obligations, right?”

“We are buried under 1.25 quadrillion dollars in debt.”

“Obama is apologizing to the Frenchy French for our arrogance.”

“He’s bowing to the Saudi Arabian king.”

“He’s also closing Gitmo and letting the terrorists onto the streets.”

“The Congressional Black Caucus met with Fidel Castro … Ninety-three percent of [the] Cuban labor force works for the state. Sound familiar? … Seven abortions for every ten babies born in Cuba. Sure, sounds like a vacation in Disneyland to me.”

“Obama wants to legalize the illegal aliens.”

Schulz obediently shivered, hyperventilated, and rubbed his eyes as the fluid covered his head and shoulders. On-screen, a cartoon Beck appeared with the words “Don’t worry, it’s water, I promise.”

“Do you have any matches?” the host asked. A production worker on the set brought him a pack.

“President Obama, why don’t you just set us on fire?” Beck asked. “For the love of Pete, what are you doing? … We didn’t vote to lose the republic.”

The match was lit and blown out without igniting Schulz. Beck continued the rant: “You’re spending money that leads only to slavery! … We can disagree with each other on policies, but Good Lord Almighty, man, please. Some of us don’t agree with all of the policies. We’d like to have a country left in the end of four years. No need to set us on fire.”

Beck turned to his other guest, who happened to be the governor of Texas, Rick Perry. “Governor, you’re regretting being on this program at this point, are you not, sir?”

“Not at all, Glenn Beck. I’m proud to be with you.”

Beck later explained: “I just want to show you, kids, water, not gasoline. I was—I was actually told by our legal department, ‘Glenn, you can’t just do that, you’ve got to’—I said, ‘Yes, this is why our country is so screwed up if I got to actually say, that wasn’t really gasoline, kids.’ Don’t do that at home. That would be really, really bad.”

Moments later, he had an addendum for the kids: “By the way, that was absolutely high-octane jet fuel.”

* * *

Love Glenn Beck or hate Glenn Beck, there is no denying the man is an entertainment genius. His props, his costumes, and his overall shtick are the worst, which is to say the best, in the business.

The man who makes tens of millions of dollars from his TV, radio, and Internet interests likes to wear blue jeans and sneakers on the set along with his jacket and tie. The man who skipped college is rarely on air without his trusty chalkboard so he can give a professorial illustration of his points and paste up photographs of those whose scalps he would claim. The comedian Jon Stewart alleged that the populist Beck travels with two chalkboard “caddies” when he takes his show on the road.

Stewart obviously doesn’t appreciate the high degree of risk involved in using a chalkboard for a prop on live television. One night, Beck was employing his chalkboard to find a code in various words he associated with Obama (“left,” “international,” “graft,” “revolutionaries”) and, cracking the code, spelled the word “oligarch” on the board. Except he wrote “OLIGARH.” Beck had forgotten to write the C-word. (Communists? No: czars.)

That’s life on the high wire, and Beck likes it there. One night he’ll come out with inflated rubber balls for a round of dodgeball. Another night he’ll have an actor dress up as Thomas Paine and read Beck’s words as if they were a modern-day version of Paine’s famous
Common Sense
. Or he’ll pull out his red “Mao hotline” phone and wait for President Obama to refute Beck’s accusation that the White House is a den of communists.

The night after
Avatar
director James Cameron called him a “fucking asshole,” Beck went on air, put on some paper 3-D glasses, and scrolled through “The ‘I Hate Glenn Beck’ Club, featuring Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews,
Law & Order
, the Playboy bunny, and now Cameron.”

Some of the stunts go well beyond normal bounds of taste and demonstrate why Beck is no mere “rodeo clown.” Consider his playful skit about poisoning the Speaker of the House. He had a person on the set wear a Pelosi mask, then passed a glass of red wine across the table. “You gonna drink your wine?” he asked. “I want you to drink it now. Drink it, drink it, drink it.” Moments later, he added, “By the way, I put poison in your—no, I look forward to all the policy discussions that we’re supposed to have.”

At least he didn’t boil the Speaker of the House in a pot of water.

Others were not so lucky. It was in September 2009, and Beck’s show was tracking over the usual ground. He had the latest on the ACORN “weasels” who were “helping to start brothels with illegal thirteen-year-olds.” He went after the Kennedys, George Soros, Barney Frank, the Service Employees International Union, the Apollo Alliance, the Tides Center, the Needmor Fund, Van Jones, the Rathke brothers, and many others, tying them all into an Obama conspiracy. “Sometimes I feel like Russell Crowe from
A Beautiful Mind
, trying to lay it out for you. But it’s difficult to demonstrate because it is massive.”

Or imaginary.

But tonight, Beck had something new to say, and a new way to illustrate things. He was going to explain why John McCain could have been even worse as president than Obama—because McCain, too, is a dreaded “progressive.”

Beck turned to a steaming stainless-steel pot of water on the set. “Let me explain this to you using this boiling water here, and these little frogs. You know the old saying, if you put a frog into boiling water, he’s going to jump right out because he’s scalding hot. But if you place him in lukewarm water and gradually raise the temperature, the frog won’t realize what is happening and die.

“Let me get the frogs,” Beck continued, reaching his hand into an aquarium full of what appeared to be frogs hopping about. “Okay, all right,” he said, eventually pulling one out and cupping it in his hands. “So you have the little frogs here.”

And now to his point: “Barack Obama has galvanized the country, because of the sheer size of the bills he has proposed, and the number of the bills, the urgency that he has been placing on the bills. He has forced us to think and get involved. We have not—like John McCain—been boiled slowly. We have been tossed quickly into boiling water. And don’t forget what happens when you throw them in. When you throw them in, frogs into boiling water—”

Beck at this point tossed his frog into the pot, and there was a long pause. No frog jumped from the pot. “Okay, forget the frog,” he resumed. “I swear I thought they jumped right out but they don’t.”

Only then did Beck say the frog “was fake.” He then asked his guest, former Bush administration official John Bolton, to verify the animal’s inauthenticity. “I know PETA is going to be all over me,” he said. “By the way, the whole thing with the whole boiling water and a frog—that’s fable. It’s not true. We knew before we did that. Ambassador, will you verify that it’s a rubber frog, that’s not a real frog?”

The former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations obliged. “Very rubber,” he said.

“You didn’t expect to be asked that question, did you?” Beck asked.

It was the closest Beck had come to the truth all night.

* * *

Beck’s show devolves into Animal Planet more often than you might think. Months after the frog sacrifice, Beck got rabid over Joe Biden’s use of an old Sherlock Holmes line to say the administration hadn’t wasted stimulus funds. “As Joe puts it, the dog so far at least hasn’t barked,” Obama said.

Beck played this on a big screen—and began to bark. It came out as a terrier’s yap but quickly progressed to slobbering Doberman. “Dog hasn’t barked?” he repeated. “It’s like a pack of wild Cujos, ripping up the flesh of the American people. We’ve given you a dozen examples over the past year, stimulus debacles … Oh wait, here’s my favorite: lawn mowers that magically created fifty jobs.”

Beck let out a maniacal laugh, then turned to the screen and barked some more.

But if the dog and the frog were not real, the fish almost certainly was. It began with Beck pulling on some latex gloves. “I’ve got the blue gloves, because I thought they went nicely with my eyes,” he said in an effeminate voice. He struggled with the prop. “These are the worst gloves ever! We couldn’t get the stuff with, like, the baby powder in them? These are government gloves! They don’t fit, look.”

He finally got the gloves on. “Okay, here’s what I want to show you,” he began. “This is the dumbest damn show on air.” No argument was offered to contradict this, but it wasn’t the point Beck was going to make. He was going to talk about “Larry, the dead fish.”

Beck placed a copy of the
New York Times
in front of him. He took a foot-long fish out of a bucket. “Meet my friend Larry, the dead fish,” the host said. “Here he is. Hello, Larry.”

“Hello, America,” Larry the dead fish replied, borrowing a deep voice from Beck.

“Larry is here for the one reason that—Larry! Whew, Larry. Wow, Larry stinks. Larry is the dead fish that nobody wanted you to see,” Beck continued. “Larry was printing up money last week. That’s what he was doing.”

Beck began to fold the newspaper around Larry, calling out the various distractions that prevented Americans from noticing that Larry the dead fish had been printing money last week. Obama’s NCAA brackets: “Did you hear about his brackets? I loved his brackets.” The AIG hearing: “Boy, that was really making me angry.” Obama on Jay Leno: “It was just crazy.”

Larry was now wrapped in newspaper. “All of that was to cover up the dead, stinky fish, the dead, stinky fish that nobody wanted you to pay any attention to: the fact that we were printing our own money and monetizing our debt.”

* * *

There is a prop for every occasion, every enemy. A pipe to smoke while imitating liberal eggheads, a 1950s television to show an old clip from
The Music Man
, a desk to put his feet on while watching some video, and a swastika or hammer-and-sickle emblem to hold up as needed. To illustrate the proliferation of “radicals” in the Obama administration, he played a game of Connect Four against himself on the set. “We have Buffy and Yosi and we have Valerie, right? And then we have Barack Obama,” Beck explained, putting four red checkers together—apparently not realizing that four yellow pieces had already been connected. He had better luck illustrating the corporate takeover of the United States by replacing the stars on the flag with the emblems of General Electric, General Motors, Walmart, Citibank, and others.

But Beck’s populist assault on the Fortune 500 went only so far. When the topic turned to Andy Stern, former head of the Service Employees International Union, the prop was a baseball bat. Beck talks like a good ol’ boy as he describes how the union bosses will beat up on corporations. “Hey, maybe we can just give him the name and address of every executive in American business and provide Andy and his goons with, you know, free baseball bats,” he once said, brandishing the wood and even taking a practice swing. “You know that way they can just beat those company heads into submission. Metaphorically speaking. Of course no union thug would ever use something like that.”

During an SEIU segment on another show, Beck portrayed Stern as a Mafia boss by playing a clip from
The Godfather:
“Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.” (Not to be confused with Larry, the dead fish.) He then held up a shirt that said “Marxist” for White House adviser Van Jones, one that said “I [heart] Mao” for Anita Dunn, and for Stern, a T-shirt that said, “I Wanted to Overthrow the Government in the 1960’s and All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt.”