More or Less on Beck

Sally Kohn at Movement Vision Lab has initiated an ongoing, we hope, dialogue with Glen Beck, heroically challenging his inane prattle. Here is the first installment, sort of a Beck-mania primer:

The Real Lich King

E.D. Kain at Balloon Juice and Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic are in agreement that Glen Beck is the Lich King and a virulent brain eater. The Lich King thing is a WOW character that I had to have my son explain to me. He is sort of a 21st century Sauron. Though I have not hammered the Beckster here, I have no problem with their characterization, per se. I would proffer that in reality he is Saruman, merely a pale imitation. Dick Cheney is the front runner. This from Matt Yglesias.

Tony Blair confirms Dick Cheney's identity as the Lich King in his memoirs:

“He would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all their surrogates in the course of it – Hizbollah, Hamas, etc,” Mr Blair wrote in his autobiography, A Journey. “In other words, he thought the whole world had to be made anew, and that after September 11, it had to be done by force and with urgency.”

I would point to this WaPo article by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilme;

"...today, as the United States ends combat in Iraq, it appears that our $3 trillion estimate (which accounted for both government expenses and the war's broader impact on the U.S. economy) was, if anything, too low."

...

"Re-imagining history is a perilous exercise. Nonetheless, it seems clear that without this war, not only would America's standing in the world be higher, our economy would be stronger."

Dick Cheney is a real live Lich King, the driving force of evil in America.