Bad Astronomy

Glenn Beck: wait a sec. Who’s the idiot again?

I really, really don’t like using epithets. The worst you’ll almost ever hear me say is that someone is a goofball or a knucklehead. But sometimes, just sometimes, I have to call ‘em like I see ‘em. And when someone like Glenn Beck puts themselves out in the public eye pushing complete and utterly hypocritical malarkey under the guise of them knowing what they’re talking about, well, sometimes you just have to use an epithet. And since he decided to call the rest of us idiots…

So, besides being racist, wrong on climate change, wrong about taxes, and really pretty much everything else between here and the edge of the Universe, I want to point out something else Beck did.

His book, the über-ironically titled Arguing With Idiots, has blurbs on the back. The publisher decided to go with some, ah, negative comments. Here is a picture of the back of the book:

See the blurb right above my thumb? It says, “Glenn Beck is an idiot.” True enough, but it’s the attribution I’m unhappy with: they say it’s from Discover Magazine. But it’s not really: I said it. Right here, on this very blog. When I wrote that, I was talking specifically about his making stuff up about global warming and the then-raging southern California wildfires. I was a bit concerned about litigation, but having the blurb used on his own book mollifies that quite a bit.

But anyway, I just wanted to clear the air here. Discover Magazine, as an institution, has no opinion on Beck, I’m quite sure. However, I’m not the magazine. And I certainly do have an opinion, and as I have made clear, I can back that opinion up with objective facts.

Others agree, obviously. For example, Apple recently pulled its ads with Fox News because of Beck. So did BMW, and many, many more. His appalling behavior is rapidly depleting the number of companies willing to do business with Fox. I applaud them.

So anyway, I’ll leave you with this video of the fantabulous Lewis Black, raking Beck over the coals. With his ravings, Beck has managed to somehow merge the laws of both Godwin and Poe into some sort of hellish mix of insanity. Black shows that sometimes, the best way to point that out is pure satirical mockery.

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