I was forced to listen to Glen Beck the other day

[Tobin S.]

I just saw a couple of videos of Glen Beck in the political videos forum and it reminded me of a guy that I work with.

I had to ride with the guy, I'll call him George, at work the other day for 5 hours. We are truckers and my normal route was canceled for the evening so I was just riding with George and helping out so I wouldn't lose my pay for the day. The guy is a Libertarian and he knows about my political views because we have talked and argued about it the past. As long as we don't talk about politics I'm cool with him. He is actually agreeable to be around when we are talking about fishing, or our jobs, or cars, etc. So, I try not to say anything remotely political around him and we get along just fine.

It couldn't be avoided the other day when I was riding with him. He had a Glen Beck audio book that I think he had already committed to memory and he just wanted to cram it down my throat. I got the feeling that he thought of Glen's words as the indisputable truth and that there would be nothing I could say to prove him wrong. He told me that Beck had traveled the same political course that he did, coming to the conclusion that Libertarianism was the only sane world view. Beck was one of his heroes.

If you go over to the political videos forum you will find videos of Beck joking about poisoning Pelosi and actually sexually harassing a woman on the air. I don't know if George knows about that stuff, but I hope he didn't before he force fed Glen Beck to me. I really don't think George is that evil. He's just another victim of the right wing hate machine. Although he claims to dislike Democrats and Republicans, he gets all of his "news" from Fox News.

We got through the introduction of the Glen Beck book and the first few chapters on the first half of the journey. It was basically just Beck spouting platitudes about how the founding fathers didn't really mean for the country to turn out this way, and we really need to get back to doing things the way that they intended which just so happens to be, in Beck's view, some kind of Libertarian Utopia. Next he talked about social security and medicare and how much it was costing and about the burden it was putting on the tax payers and about how we need to get rid of it and about how it was doomed anyway. He cited lots of number to back up his claims.

George turned off the book and asked me what I thought about all of that. I just told him I'd have to check Beck's numbers. Thankfully, that was the end of that and we got to ride back to the yard peacefully while gossiping and talking about cars and women and such.

But I did check Beck's numbers, and as I suspected he's full of shit. I guess you all know how statistics can be manipulated. Beck is pretty good at twisting the truth, but you probably already knew that.

[Heidi]

1. George is not a victim. He's bright enough make a living in the same field you do,

and you're plenty bright and able to fact check. George is willfully ignorant. That he himself hasn't checked Beck's assertions is evidence that he's willfully ignorant and not a victim.

[Tobin S.]

2. Hadn't thought about it that way

But don't give us truckers too much credit in the brains department. I'm no genius but some of those guys make me look like one. :D

I'm kidding. You are right. George is smart enough to take a look around and judge for himself. He doesn't make much more money than I do, but he thinks the Democrats are trying to take it all away. I think he has an inflated sense of where he stands because he makes a little more than you're average working joe. He thinks that us left wingers are trying to hurt him when we really are more closely aligned with his best interests than anyone on the right side of the spectrum.

However, the right wing crap that he listens to all the time just re-inforces his delusion that we are out to hurt him. He's gotten sucked into that. In other words, he doesn't understand that he's being used like a tool. Maybe "victim" was too strong of a word, but I really do think that a lot of people here in the States are being hoodwinked and they just don't know any better. You may remember a story I wrote about half of the people in this country who work make less than $30,000 a year. America shouldn't even have a conservative party, at least not a mainstream one, but for some reason we do.