The Winkest Link

By Wink

You might imagine we at Winkest Link are highly amused by The Daily Show. You would be right.

Recently Jon Stewart performed a dead-on parody of the Beck style. This clip has become very popular on YouTube. Of course it can also be viewed on indecisionforever.com, which is a Comedy Central website connected to The Daily Show.

While the performance is hilarious, it does not quite satisfy my urge to spell out my objections to the “Beck style”

I have touched on Beck before, and probably will be forced to again sometime in the future, but I would like to share with you a post from indecisionforever.com. This is un-edited, as the words are not mine. (To maintain credibility, Winkest Link makes a high priority of accuracy and context unlike, well, you-know-who.)

“All he [Glenn Beck] does is ask questions, explain what he thinks the answer is, and challenge his audience (and the White House) to correct him.”

The problem with that is I can do that to. “Why was Palin’s daughter absent from school when Palin was allegedly pregnant? I think it was because she was the real mother of the baby. I challenge Palin to correct me! Why did George Bush Senior say he doesn’t remember where he was the day Kennedy was shot? I think it was because he recruited the CIA shooters! I challenge Poppy Bush to correct me!”

See what’s wrong with that? The “answers” are not supported by fact but mere conjecture. Given Sarah Palin and Bush probably will never see this post much less respond, I can claim that because no one DISproved me, that must mean that I’m right! In genuine logic, you’re supposed to prove your point, not throw out an unproven premise and have it be accepted as true until someone disproves it. If someone does respond, I can allege that I must be on to something for them to bother to respond to me. I can say I have them scared and feed an image of importance. There’s very little antidote to that type of demagoguery – except ridicule, which is what Mr. Stewart has applied.

“The White House has only answered him to date by firing the people he (Glenn) exposed. His critics only answer him by making fun of him. ”

The White House doesn’t own Glenn Beck explanations. The ridicule shows the silliness of the non-fact-based rhetoric.

I gave an example in another online forum of Glenn telling a story about some radio towers which had been “blown up” in a terrorist attack and how this was an assault on freedom of speech that “the liberals” were ignoring. The reality – i.e. all the news reports – actually said that the towers had been knocked down with an excavator, not blown up, and it was an act of vandalism over a years-long dispute about the towers being a public eyesore – it had nothing whatsoever to do with the content of the radio broadcast.

Now, is it other people’s job to fact-check Glenn Beck? He’s gone and twisted every single fact of the story to fit his narrative. No, when this happens again and again, you employ ridicule to show that he is a nontrustworthy news source and should be ignored. Would you fact-check the Weekly World News week after week after week? Does every Bat Boy story need a debunking?

“It’s pure rhetoric. What has he said that is in any way so ‘dangerous’? ”
See, you’re doing it too – glossing over any fact that doesn’t fit your narrative. You ask a question rather than say “Glenn Beck isn’t dangerous because….” You don’t have facts to back your supposition, and hope readers don’t either or are too lazy to check.

How about one GIANT example – he put a man on the air who said the only way for this country to be saved was for Osama bin Laden to attack it again, and Beck not only didn’t rebuke him, but appeared to agree with him. Ummm… I think encouraging a terrorist to attack us is dangerous, and trying to condition the public at large to think so to (so they’d be less likely to report suspicious behavior or stop it) is extraordinarily dangerous.

“Who wants groups like Acorn to commit vote fraud?”

That’s one of those “when did you stop beating your wife” questions. ACORN hasn’t committed vote fraud.

” Where are the other news networks on these stories?”
It hasn’t hit you yet has it – nowhere, because THEY”RE NOT NEWS STORIES. That’s why CNN doesn’t run “Bat Boy escapes!” headlines. They’re NOT REAL.

” Who wants SEIU thugs to be free to beat up people who oppose them?”

Health care workers are not beating up people.

“What part of these stories shouldn’t be told?”

That parts that aren’t true, which would be all of them. You know, like how Hannity and Beck ran a tape that accused an ACORN member of having murdered her husband… the problem being HER HUSBAND ISN’T DEAD!!! See, these guys don’t check facts because they’re not relevant. Beck’s listeners don’t check them for the same reason. It’s not an acceptable news model for one party to constantly lie and everyone else has to try to catch all their lies and expose them. It can be impossible at times to prove a negative. Take my Bush/JFK example above. If Bush himself doesn’t know where he was, you can’t know where he was, and the only way to PROVE he didn’t kill Kennedy would be to put him somewhere else, then you can’t DISPROVE the assertion, so I must be right! Is that the logic we should use in the arena of public discourse?

“If you deny these stories then validate your denial with evidence, not by ridiculing the messenger.”

You still don’t understand how science and logic work. When you make an accusation, you have to prove it, I don’t have to disprove it. Otherwise blowhards can make #$#% up all day and about 10% of it will get through. It’s up to you to present all of your facts and then draw a valid conclusion. Then I can examine and question those facts, whether the conclusion drawn is valid, or whether there are additional facts that refute the conclusion.

by Joseph G. Mitzen November 19th (2009) at 10:08PM

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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