Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America (15 page)

CHAPTER 13
THE FACTS ARE STUBBORN THINGS

“There are so many loosey-goosey facts here on today’s show,” Glenn Beck told his Fox viewers one evening early in 2010. What he was saying was true. The question is why he felt the need to make the disclosure on that particular show, when it could be applied equally to just about every one of his shows.

There are lies, there are damn lies, and there is
The Glenn Beck Show
. Sometimes he posits falsehoods of no great import. Sometimes they are falsehoods that completely turn reality on its head. More often, Beck begins with a kernel of truth and then bakes the kernel in a casserole of bizarre suppositions. He then serves up a wildly implausible prediction—which by definition can’t be disproved because it has not yet happened. There is no way to prove that the country will
not
be taken over by fascists next year, any more than it is possible to prove that the earth will not be destroyed by an asteroid next year.

Beck’s frequent history lessons are steeped in “facts.” Such as this fact that he produced on
Fox & Friends
one morning in the form of a question about the untapped oil in Alaska: “Why did we buy Alaska in the 1950s?” A good question—particularly since Alaska was purchased in 1867.

“We have the Age of Enlightenment, 1620 to 1871, uh, 1781,” Beck said in another history lesson. “This was a time when people said, wait a minute, wait a minute, we can think out of the box. This is coming out of the Dark Ages.” The Dark Ages ended in about 1000 AD, but what’s an extra six hundred years here or there?

Beck used history again to liken the Obama administration to imperial Russia, by discussing his use of “czars”—powerful advisers who are not confirmed by the Senate. “We’re talking about these thirty-two czars” in the Obama administration, he said. “But we really don’t even know who these czars are because they don’t answer to the Congress. They don’t have to be approved by the Congress … What are we doing?”

What we are doing is making stuff up as we go along. Turns out, according to the University of Pennsylvania–affiliated
FactCheck.org
, nine of the thirty-two were confirmed by the Senate, eight were not appointed by the president, and another seven were in positions created by past administrations. FactCheck further found out that George W. Bush’s administration had been even more “czarist” with thirty-five.

Historian Beck presented to his viewers the news that “Thomas Jefferson created the Marines for the Islamic pirates that were happening, right?” Sorry, not right. The Marines, as the group PolitiFact points out, were created in 1775, then reactivated in 1798 under President John Adams to deal with French, not Islamic, pirates. Beck, however, has his own texts offering their own facts. Recommending a book one night by a conservative who rewrote the history of the nation’s founding, Beck asserted that the book must be true because “it’s all footnoted.” Modern history is also problematic for Beck. He said of Obama: “This guy is dangerous. He’s never lost before. He won’t understand it.” Obama lost a congressional primary in 2000. Beck said his “best bud,” economist and columnist Paul Krugman, “missed the industry’s $8 trillion housing bubble.” Alas for Beck, a Nexis search finds that Krugman warned as early as 2002 in his column that “more and more people are using the B-word about the housing market.”

“History has proven over and over again,” distinguished professor of history Beck lectured at another point, “that government is not the answer.” Obama did not understand this lesson, the professor continued, because he has so few people in his cabinet with “private sector experience”—“under 10 percent” for Obama, compared to “over 50 percent” for Nixon. Beck was basing this view on an article on
Forbes.com
that turned out to be wrong. The correct number for Obama was more like a third—higher if you look at all cabinet-level appointees.

Numbers can be problematic for a man with a point to make. Beck got tripped up by these infernal digits when he informed his audience that 49 percent of Americans “don’t pay any tax.” Actually, fewer than 10 percent pay no federal taxes, and even fewer pay no state taxes; the 49 percent were those who don’t pay federal income taxes.

Likewise, Beck delivered the alarming news that Chile was ranked third in the world in “economic freedom,” and the United States was seventeenth in the same study. Scary—if true. PolitiFact, an offshoot of the
St. Petersburg Times
, located the source of Beck’s figures: the conservative CATO Institute, which actually put Chile in fifth place, and the United States a fraction of a point behind, in sixth.

Maybe that was just a misunderstanding. Numbers can be so confusing. But it’s hard to say the same of Beck’s assertion on his radio show that “in the health-care bill, we’re now offering insurance for dogs.” There was nothing of the sort in the bill.

And what to make of Beck’s assertion on his Fox News show that the United States is “the only country in the world” that grants automatic citizenship to those born here. Turns out, as PolitiFact pointed out, there are thirty-four such countries, so Beck was off—let’s see here—by thirty-three.

Many of these discrepancies are of little consequence. But sometimes Beck will sneak in a whopper that fundamentally revises the historical record. Consider his claim of April 2009 that Obama, “when confronted with the spending and socialism bailouts … has reminded us over and over again that President Bush was in office when [the] TARP bailout happened. Well, we were all against that!”

We were? Then how do we explain this Beck quotation from September 2008, a mere seven months earlier? “It takes everything in me to say this,” he said then, but “I think the bailout is the right thing to do. The real story is the $700 billion that you’re hearing about now[, which] is not only, I believe, necessary, it is also not nearly enough, and all of the weasels in Washington know it.”

But Beck, though a newcomer to government spending restraint, still was not going to be moved away from his criticism of Obama’s spending. On one show, he claimed that “the highest” level of spending under Franklin D. Roosevelt was 12 percent of GDP, in 1941. “This is what Obama is planning on spending,” he went on. “Whoa! Remember—highest, 1941, was 12 percent. Here’s the lowest [for Obama, in 2013] at 22.8 percent.”

But Beck left out a few relevant numbers, such as FDR’s spending in 1942 (24.3 percent), 1943 (43.6 percent), 1944 (43.6 percent), and 1945 (41.9 percent).

The loosey-goosey nature of Beck’s facts might be easier to dismiss as entertainment if so many didn’t take Beck’s claims at face value—even those who should know better, such as members of Congress.

On June 21, 2010, in one of his “Crime Inc.” installments, Beck went after the liberal billionaire George Soros, whom he described as a currency manipulator of Jewish ancestry with “disturbing hair in his nose.”

Beck told his viewers that the Obama administration made “a $2 billion preliminary commitment for Petrobras”—the Brazilian oil company—“just days after he [Soros] strengthened his investment” in the company. “Then Obama suspends the deepwater drilling at 1,500 meters,” Beck went on. “Petrobras is drilling at 2,777 meters. Obama knows it and loans $2 billion to Petrobras.”

This allegation, reported by Beck as fact, turned out to be an Internet rumor that had been disproved nine months earlier by FactCheck. The “preliminary commitment” to Petrobras was not from the Obama administration but from the U.S. Export-Import Bank—at a time when all five members of the bank’s board had been appointed by George W. Bush. The loan from the bank, which is self-funded and doesn’t rely on taxpayer money, was to buy U.S.-made oilfield equipment. And Soros actually reduced his stake in Petrobras before any of the loan had been made.

But Beck’s version of the “facts” was good enough for Rep. Dan Burton, a veteran Indiana Republican. “The thing that really is funny about this is we just sent $2 billion to Brazil so they could do offshore drilling,” he said on the House floor the day after Beck’s report on the topic. “We don’t need to be sending Mr. Soros money in Brazil so he can make more money by doing offshore drilling with our taxpayers’ money.”

At least Burton didn’t mention Soros’s Jewish ancestry and his nose hair.

Facts can be such messy things. That’s why it’s better to clean them up a little before taking them out in public—or, better yet, leaving the messiest ones at home.

On the third day of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s confirmation hearings before the Senate, for example, Beck said that Kagan had “strongly implied” in an argument before the Supreme Court that political books could be censored. “You know, that doesn’t make me feel warm and fuzzy inside that we got a person that would sit on the Supreme Court and say ‘ban books.’ Get the hell out of my courtroom!”

What Beck neglected to mention was that Kagan, in testimony the day before, explained that her job in making the argument as U.S. Solicitor General was “to defend the statute as it was written” and not to offer her own opinion. Kagan told the committee that “the act ought not to be applied” to books, that “we thought it never would be applied to books,” and that “to the extent that anybody ever tries to apply it to books, what I argued in the court was that there would be a good constitutional challenge to that.”

Long before Beck accused Kagan of a book-banning crusade, he asserted that union leader Andy Stern was “the most frequent visitor of the White House, over the secretary of state and everybody else.”

But White House visitor logs released a week before Beck made that charge showed that the most frequent visitor at the White House up to that point was Treasury adviser Lee Sachs, whose ninety-two visits were nearly quadruple Stern’s twenty-four. And it turned out the secretary of state’s visits weren’t captured in the visitor log because she doesn’t have to go through the regular Secret Service security gate. But this wasn’t nearly as sexy as Beck’s claim about Stern being “the most frequent,” which may have had something to do with his basing his report on an earlier, incomplete release of visitor data.

Likewise, a crucial detail was obscured when Beck delivered his alarming report that those who logged on to the “cash for clunkers” program at
CARS.gov
could have their computers’ contents “seized” by the feds.

“You log on to this at your home, everything in your home is now theirs?” Beck asked his guest.

“Basically,” she replied.

“Good God Almighty!” Beck said.

That
did
sound pretty bad. Except that, on further review, it turned out this only applied to car dealers, not car owners, and even dealers wouldn’t have to surrender their private information to the government. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Beck said with mock regret on a later show after this was pointed out to him.

When somebody says things that aren’t true, he’s not necessarily a liar; he may just be uninformed. In Beck’s case, however, this possibility was tested and discarded by no less an authority than the ladies of
The View
on ABC. Beck appeared on the show one morning and was immediately ambushed by Whoopi Goldberg and Barbara Walters over a description he’d given on the radio of a recent meeting among the three of them on an Amtrak train bound for Washington.

Beck claimed that the women approached him on the train to talk, and that Goldberg and Walters had “reserved” seats on the train, contrary to Amtrak’s policy of not assigning seats—and then he had a good laugh with his listeners. Turns out neither claim was true.

Confronted on live television, Beck immediately confessed to “a mischaracterization” of the circumstances of their meeting. “Why did you lie about that?” asked Joy Behar.

“I don’t know,” was Beck’s response.

“You just had a brain fart or what?” Behar pressed.

“You’re accusing me of lying,” Beck countercharged, recovering.

“You did lie,” Goldberg said. “You’re a lying sack of dog mess.”

Beck finally apologized. “I’m sorry that I, to use Nancy Pelosi’s words, misspoke.”

Walters, informing Beck that she had not reserved a seat, wanted to know why he claimed otherwise. “You are an investigative reporter,” she said.

“No, I’m not,” Beck said.

“You’re a reporter.”

“No, I’m not.”

“So you check no facts at all?” Walters asked.

“No,” Beck answered. “No. I am a commentator.”

And being a commentator means never having to say you’re wrong.

The most frightening Beck assertions, though, are not about botched facts or numbers. They are assertions that would strike an ordinary person as zany—but just might be believed by a small minority, such as three million nightly Beck viewers. American liberals, he asserts, “have been raised to hate the United States government in many ways.” Union supporters “are also for one world government.” How to disprove this? Polygraphs?

Likewise, when black Democratic congressmen claimed that hecklers on Capitol Hill shouted epithets and spit on them, Beck went on air to say there’s “no proof or evidence of any spitting.” Perhaps he expected a saliva sample to be provided.