Originally posted at The Springfield, Mo. News Leader you are welcome to go there, log on and help me refute the local wingnuts... bear in mind the audience I write for there and the limit of 500 words I'm allowed.
Recently I used my 500 words to warn that Glenn Beck is the most dangerous demagogue in America. I revisit the subject not because I have altered my opinion, but rather to stress, with new evidence, why this is so.
His gloating revelation of the Acorn tapes (a 97 lb. weakling of scandal that Halliburton would sneer at) did not prompt this return, nor the 9/12 crankfest that he attempts to hype into a wingnut Woodstock. Such antics hardly represent a new act from Beck’s circus worthy of mention.
Rather, a piece by Alexander Zaitchik at Salon.com profiling W. Cleon Skousen, the inspiration for Beck’s profane rewrite of American history, compels me to keyboard. I had not known of Skousen, author of "The 5,000 Year Leap". I knew only that Beck’s spiel smelled of right wing nutbaggery... now I know why.
Skousen was a right wing filbert of the highest order and, like Beck, a Mormon, who served fifteen years with the FBI before retiring to Joseph Smith land to four years as Police Chief of Salt Lake City then a teaching gig with BYU. During his colorful career Skousen authored a couple of compilations of misleading quotes and crackpot theories that pass for books in some circles, amassed a 2,000 page dossier with J. Edgar hisself coloring him a "domestic right-wing extremist threat" - especially after calling President Dwight Eisenhower a "dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy" - and, in 1981, produced his opus and Glenn’s prayer book..."The 5,000 Year Leap".
Basically, Skousen asserts that the founders cribbed their ideas about democracy from Israel, King David and Moses... thus, the "5,000’ Year Leap".
Richard Packham, an escaped Mormon who earned a Masters degree from Northwestern University, reviewed "5,000" and summarizes: "Skousen is very quick to jump to unwarranted conclusions. Rather than relying on well-reasoned arguments, he cites authorities, frequently distorting his sources. He fails to prove his view of Biblical law and its relationship to the American Constitution. He fails to provide any evidence for many of his most important points. He does not reveal that the source for many of his ideas is in Mormon theology."
Rather than celebrating the true genius of Jefferson and Madison, who placed man’s liberty within the possession of their deistic God and so out of the reach of autocrats, than secured God himself in the hearts and minds of men and so finally out of the reach of theocrats, Skousen attempts to wed religion and government in a way that besmirches the intent of the founding fathers.
And Packham warns us why. "Mormons firmly believe that the Constitution will someday "hang by a thread," that is, be in danger of being overturned or destroyed, and at that point it will be Mormons, or the Mormon Church, which will save it. At that point America will be so grateful that the government of the country will be placed in Mormon hands."
Is this a mission Beck envisions for himself?
X Posted @ MyLeftWing