Dear Glenn Beck: The Meaning of “Barack”
Feb 5, 2010 Culture Wars, Faux Noise Channel, Faux Noise™, Glenn Beck, Kulturkampf, Obama Derangement Syndrome, Obama antichrist, Obama smears, Obama's middle name, Scare Words, progressives
Okay, that’s it Glenn. You’ve gone too far:
BECK: He chose to use his name, Barack, for a reason. To identify, not with America — you don’t take the name Barack to identify with America. You take the name Barack to identify with what? Your heritage? The heritage, maybe, of your father in Kenya, who is a radical? Really? Searching for something to give him any kind of meaning, just as he was searching later in life for religion.
Meanings of barack and derivations: to kneel, to bless, to invoke blessings, to sanction, to be blessed, to enjoy or find pleasure or delight, to ask a blessing, to seek a blessing, to be praised, to be sublime.
A bierka is a pool or small pond, which is a sacred item in desert cultures. Check the Old Testament and you’ll find that Hebrews had some harsh treatments for anyone who poisoned a well; it was considered a crime against humanity.
There are other nouns based of the root barak: blessing, benediction, bounty. There is a negation meaning “misfortune” or “bad luck.” There are several parts of speech made from the root: when an Arab needs congratulations, you should say mabrook.
This information comes from from my taxpayer-supplied copy of the Hans-Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, which still smells of Kuwaiti sand.
Glenn, I understand your problem: you are a clown with a circus. You are forced to top yourself each and every weekday. Every morning, you must pray to god for inspiration to top the boiled frog episode. This would just be entertainment if not for the fact you serve a rotten agenda: to rally racists, idiots, lunatics, and otherwise good Christians to the banner of the Republican Party.
Not that I mind; you’re helping to marginalize your own side. But along the way, you’ve stolen the act of every wacknoggin in the history right-wing media from Alex Jones to Father Coughlin, and now you’re channeling Jack Van Impe. You never know what the hell you’re talking about because your reading list consists of John Bircher paranoia, Atlas Shrugged, and — apparently — Hal Lindsey. Not a far stretch for someone who believes in golden plates and spirit-wives, I know — but still, it would all be fine except for the part where you constantly fill the heads of millions with this kind of dangerous garbage.
Glenn, you’re pandering to religious extremism and invoking the culture wars somewhere they absolutely don’t belong. I get the timing, because religiosity is hot: first there was Brit Hume, then Rush Limbaugh, and of course we have the highly-questionable testimony of Tim Tebow’s mom coming up in the midst of the f***ing SuperBowl this Sunday.
But this is really, really dangerous. You are telling your cult of worshipful know-nothings that the president serves the dark side, and by doing so you encourage very un-Christian divisions. Fear and hate are the tools of darkness. The truth is that YOU serve the dark side, Glenn. Your entire line of attack on Obama is psychological projection, like when you call Obama a “racist” and then pander to racism.
In fact, as long as we’re on the subject of things you project, consider your employer’s cozy relationship with the Chinese communist party. Hey, look — I connected YOU to actual, living, breathing, non-imaginary commies in one step — and without a chalkboard prop to make people think I maybe know what the fuck I’m talking about.
As long as I’m on a roll: the president might have changed his name to Joe Wilson or Bobby Jindal; but he instead chose to keep his birth name “not (as) some assertion of my African roots … not a racial assertion. It was much more of an assertion that I was coming of age. An assertion of being comfortable with the fact that I was different and that I didn’t need to try to fit in in a certain way.”
Get that, Glenn? Barack Hussein Obama kept his name because America is already enlightened enough to vote for a black man with a funny foreign name. Which just goes to show that you’ve already lost. The most you and your colleagues in the wingnutosphere can hope to accomplish is to make it as likely as possible to come to violence — just like the fight against progress did in the 1860s and 1960s.
Oh, which reminds me of one other thing: I’m sick of you pretending to know what “progressive” means. You’ve filled up endless hours of airtime with horse manure about a movement you don’t understand one tiny bit. I’ve done a better job of explaining the history of the progressive movement in a five-minute rock video than you have done in your entire career:
We’ve all been in those mind-numbing, stomach-churning, sleep-inducing conversations with people whose brains seem to be smaller than their mouths. They’re always endlessly long, painfully agonizing and hopelessly futile. I’d attempt to get past the screeners and tell you all this myself, Glenn, but it would be pointless. Just grow the hell up, you stupid racist bastard.
The Life-Cycle of Nontroversy
Oct 7, 2009 Scare Words, Zombie Outrage™, nontroversy
If Sen. Feingold was trying to get the “czars” nontroversy out in the open, he succeeded. Five constitutional experts told his Senate committee yesterday that the policy positions are perfectly legal, and have been since Franklin Roosevelt:
“The president’s personal staff are independently responsible only to the president — and in the end he is the only czar that is,” said Bradley H. Patterson, a presidential scholar. “And he is accountable to the American electorate.”John Harrison, a University of Virginia law professor, compared the czars to the position of White House chief of staff, saying both hold great influence and can speak for the president, but their legal powers are limited.
Their “practical authority . . . is not legal authority, and as long as the distinction is rigorously maintained there will be no legal problem,” Harrison said in his written testimony. (Emphasis mine)
The GOP is determined not to let this silly nontroversy die. Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) says she still has questions. Once again, it’s time to trace the life-cycle of nontroversy:
1) Right-wing media figures seize on scary-sounding item.2) Viewers, ignorant of history and given no context, contact lawmakers.
3) Progressive blogosphere debunks nontroversy.
4) Republican lawmakers denounce newly-controversial item.
5) MSM engages in credulous stenography. Nontroversy erupts.
6) Democrats debunk nontroversy.
7) MSM moves on to new nontroversy.
Republicans repeat the nontroversy long after it has died.
9) Nontroversy becomes Zombie Outrage™.
The “czars” phenomenon is now in stage 8; it will reappear in GOP fundraising letters and Glenn Beck’s doom bunker from time to time as an issue the MSM has “covered up.” At that point, no amount of congressional hearings or factual debunkings can stop the Zombie Outrage™ from wandering the land, infecting minds with Teh Stupid™.
See how that works?
Words Are Scary: Czars Edition
Sep 20, 2009 Scare Words, Teh Stupid™
Since fearmongering depends on Teh Stupid™, unfamiliar words are easily demonized in the American mind. To the famous examples of madrassa and Hussein, we now add the word “czar.”
“Czar” has everything you’d like in a scare word: foreign-ness, a touch of alien otherness, and a single syllable you can repeat fifty times in one broadcast hour. It is ironic, however, to watch members of the media punditocracy obsess over a word invented by their own industry to avoid printing the long job titles of special appointees.
The historical record on czars is also interesting:
Since the end of WWII, most presidents — Democrat or Republican — had only a handful of these advisers. Until Bush Jr., Clinton had the largest number of the postwar era at seven. Bush had thirty-five.
Incredibly, several Republicans have seized on this meme without a bit of irony. Where were they from 2001-2009?
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ACORN: Because Words are Scary!
Aug 30, 2009 ACORN, Glenn Beck, Scare Words
It isn’t just foreign words like madrassa or Obama or oligarhy (sic) that scare Glenn Beck fans, oh no. English words frighten them too.
For example, there’s “acorn” — a perfectly harmless object that, pronounced in a breathless question, can be turned into Obama’s secret army to take over the country oh noes!
In a post worthy of nomination to the Glenn Beck Writing Hall of Fame, Jenkin’s Ear demolishes this canard:
- The stimulus package funneled billions of dollars to ACORN. How does giving billions of dollars to ACORN stimulate the economy?
Where did it do that? I just searched the text of the bill, and ACORN was not listed. There are a number of places where someone who is not versed in how bills are written could terribly misunderstand something, but nothing that seriously means that.
Fact: this is not a question, but a lie phrased as a question. It’s akin to someone hypothetically asking the question: How does Glenn Beck kidnapping and feeding homeless people to his secret lizard army benefit society?
Another War of Jenkins Ear is my new favorite blog.
