Like many of you I saw this video of Glenn Beck in July of going completely crazy on "Kathy of Massachusetts" after she accused him of not caring about the "trillions of dollars to bail out the banks and the credit card companies."
"Get off my phone you little pinhead!" Beck screamed in self righteous anger. "I don't care... I don't care" he seethed sarcastically.
But today, I came across this piece in which last year, WHEN IT MATTERED, Beck not only supported the bailout, but he thought it wasn't enough:
"I think the bailout is the right thing do. The "REAL STORY" is the $700 billion that you're hearing about now is not only, I believe, necessary, it is also not nearly enough, and all of the weasels in Washington know it." - Glenn Beck, 9/22/08
Now we know why Kathy set off a nerve for Glenn Beck-- she came close to uncovering his hypocrisy--
As Frank Rich notes, Beck has been promoting himself not only as a racist culture warrior, but as an economic populist who rails on government giveaways to Wall Street.
But the transcript linked above shows that Beck not only supported the bailout, he thought it should have been much bigger. Here's Beck using the exact same logic that Paulson used to sell TARP to Congress:
BECK: We have to meet with the president, and we have to bail all these -- have a massive just change in strategy.
One of his people said, "What happens if they don`t do this?"
And [Paulson] responded with something that should shake Americans to their core. He said, "If they don`t do this, then heaven help us all," right?
Here's Beck using an analogy of a falling plane, implying that the bailout will save Main Street:
BECK: Well, now we`re stuck in a position where we let that plane fall out of the sky or we do our best to try to have some sort of a controlled crash landing that saves lives and let us salvage what we can. I mean, there are 350 million people on this plane.
...
BECK: Nouriel, let me go to you, because my idea of these bailout is not that it`s going to work...
There`s more coming around the corner. I think it is to control the crash it is going to crash if you do it or if you don`t do it. One way, it`s guaranteed to crash and be awful and really ugly and bloody. The other way, it`s going to crash, but we might have a little less blood. Do you agree with that or not?
Here is Beck, two days later on September 24, telling Senator DeMint that he is for the bailout:
GLENN: Okay. Senator, I have been against every single one of these bailouts. This one I have said that I am for because I believe it is slow down catastrophe.
But that he thinks it should be $2 trillion instead of $700 billion:
I don't believe for this to work, it's going to take $2 trillion. There's just no way this is $700 billion, no way.
Beck continued to support the bailout. On September 25, 2008 he wrote a CNN article solely to argue for it. In which he used his airplane analogy again.
Beck was for the bailout before he was against it. Not only was he for it, he campaigned for it on his show and his writings for CNN. And had Beck been in charge, it would have been a $2 trillion bailout. After all, less blood, right?
We progressives need to get the facts out now about Beck's disingenuous flip flops.