I Get Beck All Over Your Nice Internet

I've reached the point with the likes of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh that I try to just cut them, and any mention of same, entirely out of my day. Complaining about them just gives them ratings and you're really not going to convince anyone about them that's not already on your side. Just leave them to wallow in their own muck.

But then this came across the Fark wires, showing such a fundamental lack of basic understanding of American history by Beck that it deserves special mention. He tosses out some trees, but completely missed the forest. I'll allow Beck the courtesy of having his um's and uh's cleaned up for ease of reading...

"Tonight, you will see that... I'll show you clippings from the newspapers of the war heroes as they were buried with full honors from the Revolutionary War, where they were getting full benefits. I will show you, I held in my hand, the statement on benefits from George Washington. It was the last thing he did as the general. And it was-- this is-- these are our benefits, for the troops. There was no delineation between white and black. It was white, black, it didn't matter, if you fought... there was nothing like that from our founders. And when you see the newspaper clippings of African Americans who fought heroically and recieved full military honors and are buried at such-and-such. You see-- I'm gonna give you a piece of a sermon that was preached in the first real megachurch. It was a white and black megachurch. The preacher, at one point, wanted to separate and say 'Hey, let's just do a black church.' The congregation of the church- both white and black- said 'Why? Why would we separate ourselves?'

The things that have happened in the country where it really started to go wrong was in the leadup to the Civil War. And it became politicized and it was all about slavery. Before then, we were moving on the right track. You'll learn things tonight you've never, ever learned before, and ask yourself 'Why?'"

Race relations in America went wrong when we politicized slavery. Apparently. I think we all know why slavery was being politicized- because the north thought it was wrong for whites to keep blacks as slaves (which would tend to be a mildly questionable moment in race relations) and the south rather militantly begged to differ.

But... that said, back to ignoring Beck.

Go Yanks today.