Crooks and Liars

Glenn Beck wants everyone to rest assured he's not a complete nutcase. He's not a fan of state secession, after all!

Beck: Did you catch the New York Times this weekend? [Giggles weirdly.] They published the third -- count it, three -- the third op-ed in the New York Times blaming Bill O'Reilly and me, or Fox News in general, of spreading hate and inspiring people like the killer of Dr. Killer, uh, Tiller, in Kansas. Also, we were the inspiration apparently for the guy at the Holocaust Museum last week.

You know, there are groups out there that preach hate and violence and racial violence. There are groups out there so fed up they want to secede from the union. But we ain't one of them!

Hmmmm. An interesting denial. There's only one problem with it: Beck was downright enthusiastic about Texas secession two months ago when he interviewed Chuck Norris:

GLENN: Chuck, you live in Texas.

NORRIS: Yes, I do.

GLENN: Somebody asked me this morning, they said, you really believe that there's going to be trouble in the future. And I said, if this country starts to spiral out of control and, you know, and Mexico melts down or whatever, if it really starts to spiral out of control, before America allows a country to become a totalitarian country, which it would have under I think the Republicans as well in this situation; they were taking us to the same place, just slower.

NORRIS: It was slower, yeah.

GLENN: Americans will, they just, they won't stand for it. There will be parts of the country that will rise up. And they said, where's that going to come from? And I said Texas, it's going to come from Texas. Do you agree with that, Chuck, or not?

NORRIS: Oh, yeah. You know, Texas is a republic, you know. We could actually --

GLENN: It was a country before it was a state.

NORRIS: Yeah, we could break off from the union if we wanted to.

GLENN: You do, you call me.

NORRIS: Oh, yeah.

If the people who call for state secession are complete nutbags, then why does Beck keep featuring on his show his good buddy Chuck Norris? The guy who wrote this:

On Glenn Beck's radio show last week, I quipped in response to our wayward federal government, "I may run for president of Texas."

That need may be a reality sooner than we think. If not me, someone someday may again be running for president of the Lone Star state, if the state of the union continues to turn into the enemy of the state.

From the East Coast to the "Left Coast," America seems to be moving further and further from its founders' vision and government. ...

... I'm not saying that other states won't muster the gumption to stand and secede, but Texas has the history to prove it.

Of course, Beck is busy making this claim and running far far away from the right-wing nutcases whose theories he spent much of his first couple of months at Fox promoting.

Because heaven forfend that anyone should look at Beck's proclamation after the Holocaust Museum shooting that "the pot in America is boiling" and start figuring out who turned up the temperature.

Dr. Slammy at Scholars and Rogues has a great post on the phoninness of the "lone wolf"/"isolated incidents" meme that seems to be all the rage on the right these days.

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