Chris Wallace: “Do you regret having called [Obama] a racist and saying he had a deep seated hatred for white people?”

“Of course I do. I don’t want to retract the, um … I want to amend that I think it is much more of a theological question, that he is a guy who understands the world through liberation theology, which is oppressor-and-victim. ‘Racist,’ first of all, it shouldn’t have been said. It was poorly said. I have a big fat mouth sometimes and I say things. That’s just not the way people should behave. And it was not accurate. It is liberation theology that has shaped his world view.”  Glenn Beck

Oh boy.  Why is Glenn Beck considered the arbiter of faith in America?  Glenn Beck is not a prophet.  He was not delivered from on high, offering a message of restoration and sacrifice.  Beck is no inheritor of America’s religious promise as he claims to be.

Beck is a fraud.  In fact, his deliverance did not come from wanting to save America from wandering in darkness.  It could not have, because Beck is culpable of driving us there.   He is partly responsible for the divisive nature of our politics.

Listening to Beck wax incoherently with Chris Wallace yesterday, I felt an immediate urge to wretch.  Beck wants “people of faith to reclaim the movement (civil rights) from politics.”  He says “People of faith believe you should have equal rights to justice.”  That sounds grand in theory.  If only Mr. Beck practiced this, maybe he would be taken more seriously.  For a guy who’s appointed himself a civil rights paragon, he sure has a colorful history of racially charged, uncivil rhetoric.   He is too duplicitous on the issue to know what he is talking about.

Here’s another problem.  Beck wants people to reclaim civil rights.  The Civil Rights Movement was about equality in the face of oppression and degradation.  Of course in Beck’s usual hallucinatory rants on his radio and television shows, he equates the 1960′s civil rights movement with some form of treasonous paganism–an un-American fiat led by socialists and communists.  It’s Becks lack of authenticity that casts doubt on all of his actions–and degrades any nobility that may be hidden in his motives.  It was Glenn Beck who called Martin Luther King a communist.  It is Glenn Beck who’s misguided understanding of what civil rights mean lead him to  confuse freedom and economic oppression with manufactured partisan anger.  He’s no fan of liberation theology.  Well, that’s what the movement was.

You cannot simply co-opt the a movement without embracing its core ideology.  To do so is asinine, and emphatically arrogant.  Then again, I would expect nothing less from Beck–A man short on real solutions, yet full of anecdotal barbs laced with retrograde intolerance and derision.

Real struggle– amidst intolerance and death– is what the movement was based upon.  Beck is a clown prince, perverting the very idea of real equality and liberation–and championing the perceived sleights tea partiers feel from their government. There is no honor or civility in that.  Just arrogance and ignorance.