Listening to the right-wing(nut) media
(Photo: Bill Pugliano/Getty Images (Limbaugh); Kris Connor/Getty Images (Beck); David S. Holloway/Getty Images (York); John Storey/AP (Savage). Photo-illustration by Jesse Lenz.)
My Embed in Red
A week steeped in right-wing media reveals a Republican Party far more despairing than the lamestream knows.
By Frank Rich, New York Magazine
Published Sep 16, 2012
On the sixth day, I listened to Glenn Beck, and I saw that he was good. Or if not exactly good, then honest-to-God funny.
I had tuned in as part of a thought experiment then entering its final lap: an attempt to put myself in the Republican brain by spending a solid week listening to, watching, reading, surfing, and otherwise gorging on conservative media. As would also be true of an overdose of liberal media, it was lulling me into a stupor, and I was desperate for a jolt. Beck provided exactly that, in the form of comedy, and to my astonishment, I found myself laughing out loud—with him, not at him.
His subject was Clint Eastwood, who had stopped the show, so to speak, at the Republican National Convention the night before. Beck paid brief lip service to his party’s line—“I love Clint Eastwood”—but confessed he’d found the performance “painful to look at.” From that followed an extended comic riff, with studio sidekicks as straight men, in which he imagined the hasty backstage conference where a campaign strategist signed off on Clint’s solo act. In Beck’s fantasy, someone in the Romney camp did have qualms about letting an 82-year-old geezer vamp with an empty chair. But the skeptic had been overruled by a higher-up saying just “three magic words”—to wit, “It’s Clint Eastwood!” As in: “What could possibly go wrong? It’s Clint Eastwood!” Beck kept repeating this scenario with ever-more-manic variations, turning “It’s Clint Eastwood!” into a burlesque tagline akin to Gene Wilder’s crazed “No way out!” in The Producers (a Beck favorite). Only at the end of his shtick did politics intrude. Unless the person who said the three magic words “now has been terminated,” Beck said, he wouldn’t “trust Mitt Romney’s ability to run the country.” As he explained, it was only a small step from “It’s Clint Eastwood!” to “It’s Ben Bernanke!”—and the next thing you know, a Romney administration would be extending the term of the despised Fed chairman. He had a point.
(More here.)
By Frank Rich, New York Magazine
Published Sep 16, 2012
On the sixth day, I listened to Glenn Beck, and I saw that he was good. Or if not exactly good, then honest-to-God funny.
I had tuned in as part of a thought experiment then entering its final lap: an attempt to put myself in the Republican brain by spending a solid week listening to, watching, reading, surfing, and otherwise gorging on conservative media. As would also be true of an overdose of liberal media, it was lulling me into a stupor, and I was desperate for a jolt. Beck provided exactly that, in the form of comedy, and to my astonishment, I found myself laughing out loud—with him, not at him.
His subject was Clint Eastwood, who had stopped the show, so to speak, at the Republican National Convention the night before. Beck paid brief lip service to his party’s line—“I love Clint Eastwood”—but confessed he’d found the performance “painful to look at.” From that followed an extended comic riff, with studio sidekicks as straight men, in which he imagined the hasty backstage conference where a campaign strategist signed off on Clint’s solo act. In Beck’s fantasy, someone in the Romney camp did have qualms about letting an 82-year-old geezer vamp with an empty chair. But the skeptic had been overruled by a higher-up saying just “three magic words”—to wit, “It’s Clint Eastwood!” As in: “What could possibly go wrong? It’s Clint Eastwood!” Beck kept repeating this scenario with ever-more-manic variations, turning “It’s Clint Eastwood!” into a burlesque tagline akin to Gene Wilder’s crazed “No way out!” in The Producers (a Beck favorite). Only at the end of his shtick did politics intrude. Unless the person who said the three magic words “now has been terminated,” Beck said, he wouldn’t “trust Mitt Romney’s ability to run the country.” As he explained, it was only a small step from “It’s Clint Eastwood!” to “It’s Ben Bernanke!”—and the next thing you know, a Romney administration would be extending the term of the despised Fed chairman. He had a point.
(More here.)
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