Dispatches from the Creation Wars

I'm pretty sure Beck said it more rhetorically, to emphasize the incredible feeling of the moment and his promixity to the documents. And it's an understandable slip-up, especially considering how emotional of an experience viewing such documents can be. Of course, libs are blowing it out of proportion even after he has owned up to the mistake.

Posted by: Canny | September 7, 2010 12:16 PM

Canny, #1: I'm pretty sure Beck said it more rhetorically, to emphasize the incredible feeling of the moment and his promixity to the documents. And it's an understandable slip-up, especially considering how emotional of an experience viewing such documents can be.

Well, that's what this leftist thinks about the whole affair.

-

Of course, libs are blowing it out of proportion even after he has owned up to the mistake.

If you're talking about this blog, I don't think that Ed Brayton considers himself a liberal.

Posted by: Chiroptera | September 7, 2010 12:25 PM

re:Canny

It wouldn't matter if he wasn't busy preaching about how truth is our -sacred honor-. When you start telling other people that telling the truth is the most important thing, and then you tell a straight up lie in the next sentence, it reveals a lot about your character. Simply put, he's also lying when he says that telling the truth is so important. He doesn't really think that. He is not honest, and he doesn't have integrity.

Posted by: Kris Rhodes | September 7, 2010 12:30 PM

Canny:

That Beck is a serial and constant liar is not up for debate. That credulous idiotologues like yourself feel the need to disseminate goofy, easily debunked apologist screeds to try and convince anyone otherwise is sad. Read some non-revisionist history, add a touch of econ and get your news somewhere other than FoxNewsCorpse and you'll be a better person--or stay an ignorant, dittohead tool.

Posted by: democommie | September 7, 2010 12:42 PM

"I thought it was a little clumsy to explain it that way."

Is that a subtle way of him saying his audience has the attention span of gerbils?*

* I apologize, profusely, to any gerbils who may have been offended.

Posted by: Fifth Dentist | September 7, 2010 12:49 PM

It's not the lie itself, it's the context in which it was told that invokes groans. If you're telling someone the value of truth, you're not supposed to lie or exaggerate as a part of the process.

And yeah, this is a groan, not an outrage for me. We are, after all, talking about someone who gets in front of a chalkboard on national television to warn us about the latest nutball conspiracy theory to jump into his infowars twitter feed.

Posted by: Bronze Dog | September 7, 2010 1:38 PM

The salient point with this particular Beck lie is that the net result was, for his credulous audience, to rub off a little of Washington's magical aura onto Beck himself.

Compare with Afghanistan's Mullah Omar, during a critical time for the Taliban, coming up with an old rag at a rally, claiming that it was originally the cloak of Mohammed, and then wrapping it around himself while his followers went into spasms of ecstasy.

Posted by: Pierce R. Butler | September 7, 2010 1:45 PM

Cathy is right. Embellishing a story is a little embarrassing, but it's not a whopper - other than the possible slander against respectable professional archivists.

On the other hand, the Sandy Berger comment is a vicious lie. Beck is bearing false witness, motivated by malice. There's no excuse for that and it deserves far more of an apology than the held/beheld confusion did. Clever of Beck, though - apologizing for the little untruth and and at the same time slipping in the more egregious lie.

Posted by: Scott Hanley | September 7, 2010 1:51 PM

I came on here to make a comment stikingly similar to that just posted by James Sweet (well put James). Beck is a horrifyingly disingenuous, crass, manipulative sack of worthless dried dung. There are so many more important things to focus on than this minor white lie. While I agree that it is a telling incident indicating a man utterly without any character or integrity, I think it better to focus our attention on the endless cavalcade of real, dangerous bullshit that flows from his mouth.

Posted by: Android | September 7, 2010 2:01 PM

Beck is as dishonest about this as Victoria Jackson is about not getting a scholarship. He lies because that's his nature. She lies because make-believe is so much fun!
They could be a Vaudeville act.

Posted by: Reverend Rodney | September 7, 2010 3:02 PM

would be like criticizing Hitler for having a bad mustache.

Well if Beck had been caught lying about wearing a hair piece, then yes.

A better analogy might be like criticizing Hitler for saying some of his best friends are Jews

Posted by: steve oberski | September 7, 2010 4:08 PM

Android @17: "dried dung"

I'd change that to "wet, seeping dung" otherwise well said. The fact that Beck lied while praising truth is just another bit o'puke from old Glen. Add it to that wet pile.

Posted by: MikeMa | September 7, 2010 4:53 PM

Personally, I find lying to emphasise a rhetorical point pretty disturbing in and of itself. Feeling you have a licence to say whatever you want to make political points is dangerous. It's as if facts don't matter when you're trying to influence emotional crowds, if you're an immoral demagogue.

Posted by: stripey_cat | September 7, 2010 6:02 PM

Uh, Aquaria @ # 26 - remember the man called Richard?

Posted by: Pierce R. Butler | September 7, 2010 7:48 PM

Aquaria @ 26:

If 97% of Republicans had had to deal with facts after 1979, the party would have withered up and blown away. All they've had starting with that senile scumbag, Reagan, is lying to win office. Lots and lots of lying. [emphasis mine - MH]

It's utterly incredible to me how many people were so stupid and full of hate for the middle class and poor that they could vote for lying scumbags like Reagan.

Given the demonstrated success America had in terms of economic growth from the mid-1980s through the 1990s coupled to the end of the Cold War in spite of the state of the economy in 1979, I'd argue your first statement I emphasized above is an example of what I normally encounter conservatives doing. That is to project their willful ignorance onto their opponents while simultaneously ignoring inconvenient facts. While I've concluded projection is a defining conservative trait, it's important to note projection isn't exclusive to conservative ideologues but also infects fierce ideologues from other political ideologies as we encounter here. Unless you want to argue our distinguished success in both areas somehow came in spite of President Reagan's policies - especially when it came to his inheritance of stagflation and negotiations with the USSR which provided sufficent political space for the USSR to concede the Cold War to a determined opponent (us) who could and did spend them into oblivion while simultaneously arguing for an ultimately nuclear-free world (a perfectly liberal argument championed by Mr. Reagan).

Aquaria @ 26:

It's utterly incredible to me how many people were so stupid and full of hate for the middle class and poor that they could vote for lying scumbags like Reagan.

Given the state of both parties* in 1980 and 1984, I'm smugly satisified I voted for Ronald Reagan twice. And I didn't vote for him because I hated the poor or middle class, I was working class myself at that time. I instead voted for him because he convinced me he was a candidate better prepared to meet my objectives for the country, which were pretty simple back then (I was 20 and 24) but remain true today where I merely have a more nuanced perspective of those objectives and a modified and far more rigorous approach to assessing who can best meet the objectives. Then it was who I thought would best manage the government to optimize economic growth for the U.S. economy and secondly who would best manage foreign policy. Hate for the poor and middle class had nothing to do with it.

From my perspective and that of most historians, President Reagan had a very successful presidency, in the 2nd or at worst 3rd tier of performances. Just like the challenges of getting out of this bad economy remain incredibly intimidating (there is no easy fix on jobs), the challenges Reagan faced were equally if not even more daunting given a weak economy, horrible unemployment, and yet insufferably high interest rates which normally isn't present in a recession. How many Presidents have had to purposefully employ contractionary policies to repair a weak economy with high unemploymnent? And yet he did it in spite of it risking his '84 reelection prospects.

I'm not one of those fellows whose tribe is a political movement, my tribe is humans in general and the U.S. second; so please do not take this defense of my vote, motivations, and some of President Reagan's performance I list here as an apologia that he was always right, always successful, and harmed no-one. That of course did not happen, he harmed many and made plenty of bad decisions - some due to character flaws and out of disdain for others. However, only an ideologue blindingly attacks or defends an elected official with a perfectly one-sided argument for/against that official with few exceptions (e.g., Sarah Palin).

I remain an ardent student of President Reagan and am perfectly cognizant of his failures in both performance and character. I remain especially mindful of his performance because I find the current President's pragmatism, challenges, and willingness to make tough decisions correlate more with President Reagan than any other president. I'm not the only one who thinks this, Barack Obama is on the record as also relating what Reagan did to his own challenges and his notable foreign policy successes (enabled by a heroic Gorbechev, but also enabled by having superstar foreign policy experts such as George Schultz).

I find it kind of miraculous that I'm even able to communicate a response to you given that in your words, I'm "so stupid and full of hate".

*While Reagan was a conservative the bulk of the GOP remained centrist to center-right to the point including much of Reagan's Administration. Barack Obama compares far better to Gerald Ford, Jim Baker III, George Schultz, or Richard Nixon (at his best) than any current notable Republican leader. Simultaneously the Democrats had become utterly incompetent by 1979.

Democrats were certainly not as broken as the modern-day Republican party since it wasn't their politicians who were incompetent so much as their policies and approach to policy had been falsified. I applaud the Democrats who learned from their mistakes and from my perspective, have never looked stronger than they are now where they remain stymied merely due to a conservative element in their own party that requires purging if they're going to actually put forward more optimal policies not diluted by their own incompetents.

Posted by: Michael Heath | September 7, 2010 8:27 PM

I usually respect what Michael Heath has to say on here, but that anyone could defend Reagan after seeing what 30 years of Reaganomics has done to this country, along with the moving of the Overton Window to the point where a president whose own politics are somewhere between Eisenhower and Nixon is the "most soshulist preznit evar", and the fact that it's not Reagan's fault that the world wasn't annihilated in a nuclear holocaust during his tenure because he certainly did his best to provoke one...a;; O can say is: "Wow! Just...Wow!"

I admit that he was mainly a mindless sockpuppet for the evil cabal that bought his way into office, but he did let them use him to help implement their destructive agenda.

Posted by: The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge | September 7, 2010 9:20 PM

the general consensus seems to be that

1) really, it's a spur-of-the-moment turn-of-phrase gone awry, true in spirit if not in detail, and even if it wasn't then

2) there's way better things to criticize Beck for than the difference between 'held', 'beheld', and 'touched the case of.' It's Glenn 'Godwin' Beck for crying out loud.

I find myself in agreement with the general consensus.

Posted by: andrew | September 7, 2010 9:46 PM

The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge:

that anyone could defend Reagan after seeing what 30 years of Reaganomics has done to this country

I don't accept the notion "Reaganomics" even exists, nor did my econ professors in both undergrad and grad schools - either Saltwater or Freshwater types. Instead I perceive Reaganomics is where contemporaneous conservatives attempt to buttress their current talking points as still applicable even though conditions are distinctly different. For liberals it's merely looking at some of his falsified talking points and using an equally broad and ignorantly misrepresentative brush to paint a caricature of his policies that match some but not all of his rhetoric but absolutely do not match his actual policy implementations and their mostly successful results (I argue most of his debt creation was necessary at that time given the state of the military when he took over as President, in addition his deficit spending was mostly stimulative during a time when our economy was incredibly weak).

If you'd like a good primer on what Ronald Reagan actually accomplished and what we should learn from that time that actually worked and where he was wrong, I suggest reading Bruce Bartlett's The New American Economy: The Failure of Reaganomics and a New Way Forward. Mr. Bartlett is one of the few conservative heretics, one the first current ones given that he wrote a book presciently attacking President Bush's policies a few mere years after Bush took office but more importantly, has him supporting much of the current President's domestic agenda, including the fact we need to raise taxes back to around 18% of GDP (Bush dropped them down to 15%) and supported the President's proposal for a stimulus and workout for threatened industries.

Mr. Bartlett, one of the key economic architects of the greatest nominal economic expansion in human history as a senior economic official in both the Reagan and H.W. Bush Administrations, does a thorough job of explaining why current conservatives are wrong when they use Reagan's talking points today to defectively argue against tax increases. One of the primary reasons tax cuts were necessary in the early 80s was bracket creep, i.e., that inflation was causing goods and services to increase at a rate far faster than wages were increasing given a weak economy. That combination of weak economy, inflation, and high unemployment made it increasingly difficult for people then to make ends meet. Given our progressive tax system, pre-Reagan the two lowest quintile of earners suffered an effective 25% increase in taxes because those that were working were getting raises putting them into a higher tax bracket. The problem was that their taxes and goods and services were going up faster than their wages.

I grew up the grocery industry (my dad owned two small grocery stores) and the result for us was to put lower profit margin generic products in the most highly trafficked areas due to the high inflation of the late-1970s. Our biggest day used to be Friday and the days surrounding holidays because we were in tourist towns, during the late-1970s through early-1980s our biggest day was instead the first Tuesday of the month when people got their food stamps. My dad had to triple his price change crew to make price changes of our current inventory just so we could afford to pay for replacement inventory.

The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge:

. . . the fact that it's not Reagan's fault that the world wasn't annihilated in a nuclear holocaust during his tenure because he certainly did his best to provoke one...a;; O can say is: "Wow! Just...Wow!"

The USSR certainly didn't perceive the President as seeking a nuclear holocaust, only some liberal media members IIRC - primarily Europeans, who created a strawman version of the president that was demonstrated not to be true. In fact modern day isolationists continually look to Reagan as an example for how he avoided putting American troops into harm's way. In fact I doubt a liberal President of that era would have been able to secure the political capital needed to put the U.S. on such a radical path - the draw-down of nuclear weapons with an ultimate goal of no countries possessing any.

Of course we could maintain our strawman Forrest Gump version of this president and claim it was either a miracle or just plain luck America enjoyed so much success late in his tenure which reverberated for years. However I don't believe in miracles or that luck gets anyone very far and therefore I instead seek causal events with compelling or convincing empirical evidence, even when those facts run contra to my desired political positions as they did with Reagan.

Given that I didn't support Reagan or Clinton's tax policies (or Obama's for that matter), the important lesson I learned from all three's success (Obama's stimulus has worked to the degree of our investment) is that success can come with less than optimal strategies if one executes their game plan well.

Posted by: Michael Heath | September 7, 2010 10:42 PM

Democommie,

We agree Reagan was not a fiscal conservative. Personally neither am I. I find it to be an idiotic position given that it promotes and results in economic contraction (or less optimal growth) rather than economic growth where one thing all economists agree on is that contraction is the worst possible result an economy can experience - especially since such results cause human devastation with less ability for an economy to help those most vulnerable to such devastation.

I understand how some here could wonder how I continuously go well beyond most in this forum when I don't merely criticize conservatism but actually argue its an ungovernable political ideology. At least the American form though I don't think our movement's condition is all that different from Franco's Spain with the exception our adherents are more ignorant and insane.

Reagan's adventures in Grenada and Libya were relatively trivial and far less assertive than his conservative base was lobbying for.

I am a results-oriented person who also attempts to carefully determine the marginal difference a particular person, movement, party, or industry had. From this perspective I found a president (Reagan) whose rhetoric I normally find as repugnant as liberals. However I've also studied his presidency closely enough to find his actual policies repeatedly diverged or were largely moderated from his rhetoric - often to the great chagrin of the true conservative believers who were his biggest cheerleaders, e.g., the abominidable Ed Meese.

BTW, conservatives are equally resentful of my defense of Bill Clinton's presidency, where I gauge him equal or slightly below Reagan's performance. Clinton's gauged himself a category below Reagan primarily because he realized that Reagan inherited far greater and more complex challenges while Clinton was a benefactor of the results of the Reagan / H.W. Bush presidencies.

However the single argument I make that gets more people wanting to literally slug me is when I argue with a Michigander that the Detroit Lions should have traded Barry Sanders after his rookie season since he was a loser. Perhaps the greatest running back ever to grace a field entertainment-wise, but a loser none-the-less.

I've been making that argument since his rookie year and think I was validated on this as well. I instead remain a devout fan of Emmit Smith, John Riggins, and all the mostly nameless Denver Bronco running backs for one primary reason - when it was 3 and 3 the defense had to play the run, not just the pass where these gentleman were excellent at getting a first down and a touchdown. Not so when playing the Lions with Barry in the line-up on those plays. Of course the response to that is that Smith and the others enjoyed far better offensive lines than Barry with the Lions, where my response to that is that Barry also had a couple of years with an all-pro line and still failed to keep an extra-defenseman in the box - his playoff record even when his team had the #1 offense in the league was also atrocious. That's because the game's format rewards teams with north-south runners who don't lose yardage and gain yards falling forward - something Barry was incapable of disciplining himself to do (another aspect is the running back who can run and catch like Roger Craig or the little fast guy from the St. Louis Rams whose name I forget - but that's another category than the running backs who build up big rushing yards).

What's especially frustrating to me is that I thought the challenges of the presidency in 2001 was fairly obvious, straightforward, and required mere political will, not incredible ingenuity. The fact W. Bush ruined twenty years of progress and handed off problems to Obama arguably close to if not more perplexing than what Reagan inherited is a context that is normally avoided when gauging Bush and therefore vastly underestimates his performance.

Posted by: Michael Heath | September 8, 2010 12:12 AM

@38: Respectfully, I disagree that pointing out Beck's inaugural address story is "petty," or that calling him out on his lie is an attack, let alone an irrelevant one.
The reason it's cogent is that it illustrates perfectly how disingenuous Beck is: He lied in the midst of his "Restoring Honor" pontifications then laughingly admitted to lying because he "[T]hought it would be easier for the speech." He felt sufficiently compelled to proscribe moral conduct for others - specifically exhorting American's to tell the truth, and several times, at that - but had no qualms telling an outright lie himself. His admission itself had a kind of frat-boy dismissive tone about it and it sounds insincere to me; if he were really interested in "the truth" he could have simply reworded that statement to the effect that the curator(s) brought the address out and he was able to look at it. Instead, he concocts a story that is a bit more dramatic, but is also false.
His statements and actions illustrate his clear disinterest in "the truth:" The Sandy Berger reference is clearly just an ad hoc dig at the Left, which, among other things, puts lie to his claim that the rally - a rally that "coincidentally" fell on the anniversary of King's most famous speech - was apolitical.
Borrowing phrases from other people's speeches is not "viewed as proof of his dishonesty" by this detractor, but lying at his own "Restoring Honor" rally most assuredly is.
The saddest/scariest/infuriating part is that millions are completely unbothered by both his lying and his obvious hypocrisy.

Posted by: Tuco | September 8, 2010 4:00 AM

democommie,
That's an amazing ability you have to read into people's hearts & minds based on one short statement. You ought to take that show on the road. Maybe call up Randi for your $1M.

Posted by: highnumber | September 8, 2010 7:18 AM

I am no Beck fan but I originally thought this was much ado about nothing too. However, when I consider that he preaches to these people about telling the truth always and then tells them that they need to do things in front of their kids so that the kids will grow up to do the same, well...he certainly isn't leading by example here. If he is going to tell everyone how they should live, he should make a better attempt to live up to that standard himself first.

But, of course, that would imply that he was serious about what he said and I have doubts about his sincerity.

Posted by: Skepticat | September 8, 2010 12:38 PM

RickD:

Regarding Barry Sanders: you do understand that football is a team game, yes?

Uh, that's my point; that people look at the individual stats and highlight reels instead of considering the marginal difference an offensive player contributes to their teams' ability to make first downs, score, and win games. I'll be the first to note that Barry Sanders was an exciting player and an enormous talent, but he also demonstrated that he was also a player who didn't increase his teams' chances of winning but instead detracted from them relative to the Emmit Smith model.

RickD:

If Barry Sanders had played behind the Cowboys offensive line, he would have gained just as many yards and won just as many Super Bowls as Emmitt Smith did. I doubt Emmitt Smith would have done as well in Detroit.

Boy, I never heard that one. [snark]. I obviously believe otherwise, i.e., that the Cowboys won Super Bowls because of Emmit Smith and his ability to make first downs and touchdowns on 3rd or 4th down whereas Barry Sanders running style made for a far higher variation of events and less probability he'd get a first-down/TD. I also presented a preemptive argument you avoid, i.e., that Sanders did play with the number 1 offense in the game for one year (which was also very good the surrounding years) and behind some all-pro offensive lineman (Lomas Brown). Surrounded with great teamates that forced the defense to not key on him (Herman Moore, Brett Perriman, Johnny Morton) he was a giant bust in big games, including every play-off game he played-in and in spite of those teams having a full suite of great receivers the defense couldn't ignore.

I didn't intend to claim that John Riggins from a career standpoint was superior to Barry. Instead I was attempting to point to a style of running that contributes to winning relative to Sanders style which caused a lot of excitement and some surprise TDs but hardly the stuff of winning. If you consider winning Super Bowl teams they rarely have running backs which were top draft picks, that's because the role of a running back takes two perspectives where I focused on one and where Sanders meets neither standard - that standard is a back who provides an offense with an effective player at making first downs and touchdowns on 3 and 3 (now probably 3 and 2 given the game has speeded up) - that forces the defense to keep another man in the box. There are a handful to a half-dozen running backs in nearly every draft who can fit such a role for a few years - teams are better off using their high draft picks for other positions.

Defenses against the Lions didn't worry about stacking a man in the box in such situations, Barry was just as likely to lose three yards or not gain any than run north with a consistently reasonable shot at making a first-down/TD. That allowed them an extra man to protect against the pass whereas with Smith or the Denver suite of running backs when they were winning with interchangeable backs gaining a 1000+ yards you couldn't ignore their ability to fall for a gain.

Posted by: Michael Heath | September 8, 2010 3:27 PM

Highnumber:

Here's a tip. When someone's first ever comment, agaia, on this blog concludes with:

"Of course, libs are blowing it out of proportion even after he has owned up to the mistake"

in reference to something said by Glenn Bek, then, yeah, they're an idiotologue, preaching the gospel of dumbfuckishness.

Posted by: democommie | September 10, 2010 12:33 AM

All right. Personally I find that name calling reduces the person to whom you are replying to "the other," dehumanizing them. Still you haven't explained how you knew I was a fuckwad.

Posted by: highnumber | September 10, 2010 9:56 AM

Barry Sanders, I can't say much about. I've been a Pat's fan for about 36 years and saw some excrutiatingly bad on-field, sidelines, locker room, after hours, off season and front office performance over that period. I always liked Steve Grogan above other Pat's QB's because he just seemed to be a "playah". The Lions seem to have found a surefire formula for losing, much to their and their fans' chagrin.

Posted by: hoş sözler | January 31, 2011 8:26 AM