THIS MODERN WORLD

Subject line on my daily email update from Townhall: Your Tea Bag Might Be on TV April 15th!

The new cartoon touches on Glenn Beck’s strange view of history, which one imagines he has cobbled together from late night visits to fringe conspiracy websites maintained by psychotics, as the voices in head murmur, the symbol, on the back of the dime … it all makes sense now, doesn’t it Glenn …

Unfortunately I ran across this, via the invaluable David Neiwert, too late, or I would certainly have worked it into the cartoon somehow.

Ok, let’s walk through this. F.D.R. headed up the war efforts against the Nazis during World War II. Henry Ford did everything he possibly could to prevent the United States from fighting the Nazis because he was a fan of the Nazi regime. Henry Ford was awarded and accepted the highest medal that Germany bestowed upon foreigners in 1938. The Ford factories in Europe helped build the Nazi war machine. The rabidly anti-Semitic paper that Ford published helped inspire the Holocaust and popularized the notorious Protocols of Zion.

But in Beck’s warped, alternate universe, Henry Ford is anti-fascist because he didn’t like the New Deal … – while the guy who actually headed up the government while it fought and defeated the fascists is a fascist. Here’s a clue for the eternally clueless Beck: we actually had fascists in America during the New Deal – and some of them were opposed to it precisely because they were fascists.

Henry Ford, anti-fascist. Henry Ford. Brilliant.

… is the deal with these “this is the second notice that your car warranty has expired” robo calls? They’re like digital cockroaches, my landline and cell are both infested. And if you wait to get a human being and tell them not to call you anymore, they just … hang up on you.

Crazy Glenn Beck, after spending three and a half minutes acting out what it would be like to set one of his colleagues on fire (in order to demonstrate how put upon we all are under the Obama administration, or something), shouts at the top of his lungs, “DO YOU NOT HEAR THE CRIES OF PEOPLE WHO ARE SAYING STOP! WE WOULD LIKE SOME SANITY IN OUR COUNTRY FOR A SECOND!!!”

All righty then.

Today, April 10th, 2009, would have been Rachel Corrie’s 30th birthday. As weird old Mr. Lincoln said: “It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us.”