Fear Profiteering

Time's feature on Glenn Beck suggests he is perhaps the biggest beneficiary of the Obama paranoia cottage-industry (other than Winchester and Smith & Weston).  While one should always be wary of enemies with advice, and I'm no friend to Republicans, hitching your wagon to that star doesn't seem to be a long term strategy.  What are people going to do when they realize that Obama isn't the anti-Christ?  Or perhaps I'm being too charitable.  Some of these people might not ever figure that out.  Still, if I was a Republican, I'd be looking at this graph and rethinking the focus on tactics at the expense of strategy.

If you really want to learn more about Beck, Salon has an article about "The 5,000 Year Leap," Glenn Beck's required reading, and W. Cleon Skousen, its John Birch Society author.

Comments

[Mugatu]

That Glenn Beck is so hot right now.

[Christopher Carr]

I've often heard it said that the Republicans are best as the opposition party. Perhaps they would be better served if they stuck to traditional, Old Right, meat and potatoes Republican issues like noninterventionism in the face of an escalating Afghan war, markets as opposed to the recent Democratic Congress's gentle felacio to the insurance companies, transparency as opposed to a private corporation redistributing taxdollars to multinational investment banks, bankruptcy proceedings instead of government ownership of corporations, which is, by definition, fascism, and peaceful free trade instead of an escalating trade war with a financial high-ground-holding China. As it is, they're making Nancy Pelosi and Congressional Democrats seem like rational centrists by focusing instead on trying to convince poor Americans that an army largely comprised of the sons and daughters of card-carrying religious rightists would actually enforce martial law for a Democratic President and on the age-old writing of fake history.