Well, well, well. Guess which Mullah of the American Taliban has decided to take on Markos?
It's none other than Glenn Beck, who fired back at comments that Markos made Monday evening on Countdown.
Beck was angry at Markos for characterizing his rhetoric as "eliminationist." Beck denied the accusation, apparently forgetting the fact that earlier this year he said this:
Progressivism is the cancer in America and it is eating our Constitution. And it was designed to eat the Constitution. To progress past the Constitution. ......... It is big government – it’s a socialist utopia. And we need to address it as if it is a cancer. It must be cut out of the system because they cannot co-exist. And you don’t cure cancer by – well, I’m just going to give you a little bit of cancer. You must eradicate it. It cannot co-exist.
If that's not eliminationist rhetoric, I don't know what is.
Then, as if to prove the point, Beck effectively called Markos either a Nazi or a Communist, or maybe both. Beck's reasoning is nearly impossible to decipher, but it has something to do with claiming that Bush was supported by the progressive movement (bet you didn't know that!) and that Markos wants dictatorial control over everything (he doesn't, not even on his own blog). Somehow, according to Beck, those two "facts" mean that Markos is just like the Nazis and/or the Communists.
Suffice it to say, Markos is neither a Communist nor a Nazi. In fact, while Glenn Beck was busy getting drunk and snorting cocaine and crashing DeLoreans, Markos was serving our nation in the armed forces during wartime. And unlike Glenn Beck, Markos worked to defeat George Bush and right-wing conservatives at the ballot box, not by encouraging states to secede or calling on Americans to rise up and overthrow their government. In short, it's Beck who doesn't understand or support American democracy. It's Beck who is trying to undermine this country.
Here's video and a transcript of his crazy rant:
I want to start in an unusual place. I want to show you what the founder of the Daily Kos, which is this far-left wing blog, said. Here's what he said just the other day about tea parties:
This is what the people voted for, and it's one thing to oppose it on policy, it's another thing to use the kind of exterminationist, eliminationist rhetoric that they're using in appealing to violence and that sort of thing.
Ok. Extermination talk? I haven't heard any of the extermination talk. It sounds like, again, he's calling us Nazis. How can you paint the right like Nazis?
Actually, when I heard this, I thought "wow, this guy, I mean he proves my point." He's right -- if, if you say, those people with George Bush, they thought he was okay and they didn't do anything about it. He's right if that's really what you thought about George W. Bush and you were wide awake, because then you'd be part of the progressive movement, and that makes my point on the railroad tracks.
...
We've disregarded the railroad, the rails of the rule of law of the Constitution, and equal justice, and then taken our foundation -- faith, hope, charity, self-reliance, accountability -- and replaced it with structure, socialism.
It's what ties the communists and the national socialists -- the Nazis -- together. They disagree with each other, but that's only because they want control, and these guys want control.
It's exactly what the Daily Kos guy said. "They didn't have a problem with it before because George Bush was doing it."
But wait, wait, wait. You don't have a problem with it now? Why?
So basically Glenn Beck slammed Markos for accusing him of eliminationist rhetoric and then proceeded to prove Markos was right, arguing that it was progressives (not conservatives) who had supported George W. Bush, and that progressives support socialism, and Nazis had socialist in their name, and progressives want control, and so do Communists, so progressives like Markos are Nazis or Communists. Or maybe both. (And they supported Bush too, right?)
You know, unless Glenn Beck is saying Nazis or Communists are okay, isn't he actually engaging in exactly the kind of vicious demonization that Markos was talking about?