Tilting at windbags - by Kevin Uhrich

Jon Stewart recently did a good job on “The Daily Show” of skewering FOX’s over-the-top right-wing nut job Glenn Beck, using Beck’s blackboard full of Rube Goldbergesque diagrams, lots of phony knuckle biting and sudden dramatic hand gestures to depict this paragon of supposedly conservative virtues as the loon that he really is.

But was this extreme but still “fair and accurate” depiction of the unbalanced Beck in action really enough to undo the damage that this wackadoo’s already done — not just to the American public, but to the reputation of a man whom Beck and his tea-bagging minions have been shamelessly mischaracterizing in all their patriotic goose-stepping; the very man credited with inventing our democracy, Thomas Paine?

“The idea that Glenn Beck and others whose ideas are opposite to Paine’s have adopted him to distort his ideas is extremely disturbing, but not surprising,” writes Alaine Lowell, executive director of the Thomas Paine Society, which is based right here in Pasadena. “It is almost humorous to observe the Christian Right quoting and fawning over the man who blasted Christianity in ‘The Age of Reason.’ Clearly Beck’s disciples haven’t read any of Paine’s works and are merely parroting the few quotes from Paine that fit their agenda.”…READ MORE

posted by the Thomas Paine Project