Wednesday, October 06, 2010

Damn that Woodrow Wilson Anyway

"Don't know much about history" -- the words of a popular Sam Cooke song from 1998. It ought to be the anthem of Glenn Beck University.

The Beckster has gone off on any number of rants about the Progressive Movement of the turn of the 20th Century, but his main whipping boy seems to be Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States, comparing him to -- and crediting him with -- the rise Adolf Hitler, eugenics, the communist threat, and just about every other evil horror of the 20th Century that you can think of.

I will admit that there's a hell of a lot about Wilson that I do not admire: His lying about getting the US into WWI, his continuing segregation of the Federal bureaucracy, his overt racism (he once described the KKK-celebratory film Birth of a Nation as "history written with lightning") but he also was part of a political movement that culminated in the Federal Reserve Act, the Federal Trade Commission Act, the Clayton Antitrust Act, the Federal Farm Loan Act and America's first-ever federal progressive income tax in the Revenue Act of 1913.

So why does The Beckster vilify Wilson with such statements as "This is an evil SOB, man...One evil SOB -- bad dude!...I mean, he's a dirtbag racist, is he not?...I hate this guy. I don't even want to show his picture. No, don't do it. Don't show it. I hate this guy...He was a horror show, wasn't he? A horror show, possibly the spookiest president we've ever had."?

Well, my guess is that it wasn't because of his snobbish elite-Southern-gentleman racism but rather, since Wilson was in part responsible for all of those commie lefty pinko fellow-traveler socialists laws listed above, all of which were passed by Congress and signed by Wilson in his first term, he makes a handy target on which the know-nothing meathead Teabagger Beck can pin all of the blame for the things that have gone 'wrong" with this country since 1912.

Never mind that the Progressive Movement's biggest champion and most outspoken proponent was a guy named Theodore Roosevelt, who is apparently being let off the hook by The Beckster only because he was a Republican. Never mind the fact that TR, were he alive today, would be shunned by Glenn Beck and his own fellow-travelers in the Teabagger movement and the rest of that wholly-owned-subsidiary-of-the-wealthy-corporations, the Republican Party.

Be sure to read the Washington Post's Dana Milbank story, Glenn Beck is obsessed with Hitler and Woodrow Wilson. (I'm just saying.) for further clarification of Beck's uniquely warped perspective on American -- and world -- history.

2 Comments:

A World Quite Mad said...

Why is this poor excuse for a human being still on television? Why is he being paid a salary to speak lies and call them truth?

BTW, the link to the Washington Post story is not correct, but I googled it and found it. To comment on it:

///"American "progressives" such as Wilson, Beck explained, were responsible for inspiring "the Nazi eugenic idea [which] evolved naturally into the eventual Holocaust and the deaths of 6 million Jews.""///

Um, wrong answer. You know what led to the holocaust? Centuries of persecution of Jews by Christians. Accused of having killed Jesus/"god", accused of drinking the blood of christian babies, burned at the stake for refusing to convert, Jews were also on the receiving end of rampant propaganda that said they were not even human. That's what led to the holocaust, and you can take that to the bank and cash it.

~~~~~

"When the Know-Nothings get control, [the Declaration of Independence] will read: 'All men are created equal except negroes, foreigners and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy." --Abraham Lincoln

Farnsworth68 said...

Thanks AWQM. I fixed the link so it will go directly to the Milbank story. Great quote from Lincoln, BTW, who of course would NOT be welcome in today's Teabagger-run racist-corporatist Republican party.
--The F Man