“By the way, one thing the four stories do have in common is that they’re more anti-left than anti-state. Glenn Beck may describe himself as a libertarian, but he’s the sort of guy who gets more worked up about Van Jones being green czar than he does about the fact that we have a green czar at all.”

And was Glenn Beck performing long paranoid skits about George ‘l’etat, c’est moi’ Bush?

Or did he discover his worries about the Evil Fed Tyranny when a Democratic President took office?

http://www.juliansanchez.com/2010/07/14/libertarian-coalitions/#comment-12086

One of the more irritating aspects of Beck’s style has been his way of taking issues and encouraging people to connect the dots – which is to say examine this case through your biases to create a narrative you find easy to believe. This is just Maddow doing the same trick. ACORN and Van Jones don’t fit this story very well, but seen through a certain lens you could mention them to generate nods among people who already believe that story.

Overlooked by Maddow is the probability that recent events with Sharrod is in part a right side reaction to the exact same game being played by the left when dealing with tea party types and gun owners. Scary white men with guns. Racists all.

That’s not to dismiss how disgusting the right has been recently. Sharrod, NBPP, and pretty much everything Briebart does absolutely fits Maddows narrative, and they are doing it because it seems to have legs. Race is a political tool, used by everyone.

http://amplemedia.wordpress.com/2010/07/22/written-proof-president-george-w-bush-american-enterprise-institute-reward-racism-2/

These appeals to racial resentment weren’t a major factor even just a few months ago. In the past you might have seen, say, Glenn Beck making a bizarre argument that ObamaCare is really a reparations bill, but that sort of argument never really caught on with the rank and file.

So there’s a significant development here, but people like Maddow don’t catch it; they always see racism at work, even when it isn’t, so they’re blind to its ebs and flows. Nor can they distinguish between this wave and previous waves, even though there are significant and suggestive *differences* between the Wallace comic (which I’ve actually read!), the “hands” ad, and the contemporary stuff. So I found the clip pretty shallow, though there’s more truth to it than the average Republican will want to admit.

When a politician goes after a minority, race-based or not, he does so in order to appeal to his ugly appraisal of the majority. Anyone who thought Obama would be an exception should know better by now. He may be on the right side of the Arizona thing, but if Republicans nationally decided not to support the governor and her stupid law, he’d forget about the whole deal. Whenever anyone tells me to hate and fear someone else, I grow more suspicious of the speaker than the target.

I think the punditry has gone a bit overboard with the Maddow-love, anyway. This obsession with a conflict between rival commercial interests is too inside-baseball for most citizens. What really happened is, some scumbag blogged some lies about some random government employee, and our fearless leader broke speed records in firing her before doing any research at all. Then later Fox reported the firing and the explanation given for the firing, and then later Fox’s soi-disant “rival” reported Fox’s reporting. Can we have a sense of proportion please? I note that Sherrod herself seems more unhappy with the President than some media company, although her lawyers will probably widen the scope of her ire a bit before bringing suit.