Glenn Beck

The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities failed to capture the 2/3 vote needed for ratification in the U.S. Senate today due to fierce Republican opposition. Many Republicans and their allies in the conservative movement claimed that the treaty codifies abortion into law, even though that preposterous claim was rejected by the National Right to Life Committee and Sen. John McCain. Along with the false charges about abortion, opponents of the treaty claimed it will undermine U.S. sovereignty and harm children. Critics like Rick Santorum warned that the treaty may kill his disabled daughter; Glenn Beck said it could create a “fascistic” government and Sen. Jim Inhofe alleged the treaty would help groups with “anti-American biases.”

One of the lesser-known but extremely active opponents of the bill was homeschooling activist Michael Farris.

During an interview with Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, he claimed that the treaty will prompt the United Nations to ‘get control’ of children with glasses or ADHD and remove them from their families.

Farris: They’re called living documents, just like the disgraced living Constitution theory, which means the treaty doesn’t mean today what it’s going to mean tomorrow what it’s going to mean ten years from now. So you never know what you’re signing up for, that by itself is a good enough reason to leave it alone and to never enter into one of these things. But in particular, you hit the nail on the head Tony, the definition of disability is not defined in the treaty. My kid wears glasses, now they’re disabled, now the UN gets control over them; my child’s got a mild case of ADHD, now you’re under control of the UN treaty. There’s no definitional standard, it can change over time, and the UN, not American policymakers, are the ones who get it decided.

While speaking with the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer, the two warned that the treaty could lead to the deaths of disabled children, all the while admitting they have no evidence it would do such beyond their pure speculation.

Fischer: Disabled newborn babies in the UK are being put, oftentimes overriding the wishes of parents, on this death pathway where no matter what the parents want the doctors say this kid cannot live, severely disabled, too many congenital deformities, we think the best thing for this kid is just to be starved and dehydrated to death. It seems to me that although that’s not specifically contemplated in this treaty that could be an outcome.

Farris: Whether they thought about it or not, that’s exactly what Rick Santorum said in our press conference. He was holding his daughter Bella and she’s of the category of child that in Britain they would take that position because her official diagnosis is ‘incompatible with life.’ So when the doctor gets to decide, the doctor empowered by the government—these doctors aren’t doing it on their own, they are doing it because the government says they have the power to do it—the doctor/government deciding what they think is best for the child. It goes to the point of deciding whether the child lives or dies, it is that crazy. If we want to live in a Brave New World like that where the bureaucrats and the government and the UN all tell us what to do, fine, but this is the beginning of the end of American self-government if we go here, it’s just crazy, we cannot let this happen.

After warning that the treaty will kill children, Farris told conservative talk show host Steve Deace that the treaty will create a “cradle-to-grave care for the disabled” and said if the U.S. ratifies it “signing up to be an official socialist nation.” Farris claimed that the treaty will treat the parents of disabled children like child abusers in order to grow government power and implement “coercive socialism.”

“Everybody in America will be living under is socialism as an international entitlement” if the treaty passes, Farris maintained, “it’s a way to make the socialist, liberal, amoral element a permanent feature of our law.” Deace agreed and said the treaty will “due in freedom and liberty.”

Farris: Every parent with a disabled child is going to be in the same legal position as if they’d been convicted of child abuse. We are taking away parental decision-making power in that area. The other thing that everybody in America will be living under is socialism as an international entitlement. The United States resisted all the UN treaties of a certain category that began being proliferated in the 1960s; the first was the International Covenant on Economic and Social Rights. Our country said no that is coercive socialism, we’re not going to do that. So we rejected all those treaties ever since 1966. Yet we’re signing up now for our first economic, social and cultural treaty which means as a matter of international binding law that goes to the supremacy clause level in our Constitution, we’re signing up to be an official socialist nation, cradle-to-grave care for the disabled. Maybe Americans want to do that, but I think we’d want to do it as a matter of domestic law, not as a matter of international law. I personally don’t think that’s any business of Congress to do that sort of thing but I certainly don’t want to be doing it when the United Nations tells us to do it. So those are two big ways it will affect every American and there are more.

Deace: Michael Farris is here with us from Patrick Henry College, also from the Home School Legal Defense Association, talking about another attempt to usurp American sovereignty, to essentially do an end-run around the Constitution and then of course due in freedom and liberty through an effort through the United Nations.

…

Farris: If they can get this one through, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, CEDAW, which is the women’s treaty with all kinds of junk in that one, and then a whole host of other UN treaties that the Obama administration wants to send our way, it’s a way to make the socialist, liberal, amoral element a permanent feature of our law through the use of treaties and they are going to do a full-force attack. We’ve got to stop them now. It’s not like just the camel nose in the tent, it is that too, but we don’t want a camel’s nose in our constitutional system, that’s what we don’t want.

On some days, Glenn Beck comes right out of the gate spitting fire on his radio program and today was just one such day, as yesterday's UN vote to recognize Palestine as a “non-member observer state" prompted Beck to go off about the Muslim Brotherhood-orchestrated power-grab carried out by Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi and the on-going protests that have erupted in response, prompting him to declare that same thing is going to happen in America within five years: "Mark my words, in the next five years you will see this very thing, somebody seizing power [and a] real democracy movement standing up, but who will stand up for them? No one!" 

Glenn Beck opened his program last night with a long segment responding to the recent controversy over a a painting that depicts President Obama in a Christ-like pose and wearing a crown of thorns that has gone on display at Boston's Bunker Hill Community College Art Gallery.

Beck began by pretending to be a snooty art critic taking shots at several paintings he disliked by artists like Jackson Pollock, Vincent Van Gogh, and Peter Paul Rubens, before switching over a French artist character who went around "correcting" these paintings by covering up the nudity they contained or simply painting over them, all in order to make the point that the Constitution protects free expression and that while people are entirely free to get offended by certain works of art, they just have to learn to accept that as the price of freedom ... which he proceeded to demonstrate by submerging a bobblehead of President Obama in a mason jar supposedly filled with urine: 

As a piece of performance art, it was all mildly entertaining, but the most interesting thing about it is that one of the underlying themes of the segment was how all of these piece of art, which he considers to be "crap," have sold for millions of dollars while he couldn't understand why people would waste good money on things like this.  

So, of course, Beck has now put all of his own pieces up for sale on eBay, with the proceeds benefiting his Mercury One "Hope for the Holidays" charity effort, incuding his pièce de résistance, "Obama in Pee Pee," which had been bid up to nearly $12,000 ... before it suddenly disappeared from eBay:

UPDATE: Beck reports that the item was removed by eBay for violating the site's ban on "the sale of bodily waste."

The long holiday weekend gave Glenn Beck some time to reflect on his life's work and the state of the world and write out an incoherent schematic of all the steps it will take for him to save it, which he posted on the massive chalkboard in his studio on yesterday's program.

As he explained, God has given him a huge variety of tasks, including completely redesigning the media, preparing and strengthening families, protecting Israel, defending the Constitution and liberty, and even finding new sources of energy, all of which he concluded can only be done once he has first reformed our system of education and fundamentally changed our culture.

The only problem is that Beck doesn't know exactly how to do all of this ... yet, but it will get done: 

From the very beginning, Glenn Beck has been convinced that the Obama administration has systemically lied about the attack in Benghazi, Libya as part of an attempt to cover up the fact that it has been secretly arming Syrian rebels for the benefit of al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood in order to foment global revolution. And the sudden resignation of CIA Director David Petraeus has become further proof that the White House is engaged in a conspiracy to discredit the military, the last remaining beacon of integrity in the nation.  

Since nothing about Beck's conspiracy is in any way rooted in reality, it did not come as much of a surprise when he spun an elaborate fantasy scenario on his radio program today in which the Petraeus finally realizes that he has bottomed out and therefore decides to come clean by going before Congress today to admit that he was forced to lie about the attack in Libya in order to protect the White House, as Beck declared that "if he is truly redeemed, he will do that today" since "a man with real honor will redeem himself" by being willing to go to prison for telling the truth: 

Last night, Glenn Beck kicked off his television program with a twenty minute explanation of how the scandal involving CIA Director David Petraeus was entirely orchestrated by the White House in order to cover-up the attack in Benghazi, so as to conceal that fact the mission in Libya was itself part of an effort to arm the Muslim Brotherhood for the purpose of implementing a global revolution.

And in order to carry that out, the Obama administration must "discredit the last standing honorable American institution we have": the military ... oh, and the Secret Service too, which is why prostitution scandal from earlier this year was also orchestrated by the White House:

After having had a day to digest the election results, Glenn Beck is no longer mystified by results and the unrecognizable America that surrounds him but now knows exactly what the problem is: half of Americans are "utterly and completely lost in darkness": 

After weeks of insisting that the George Washington/Abraham Lincoln-like Mitt Romney would win a landslide victory in last night's presidential election because the Tea Party is just like the Founding Fathers and God would not allow America to fail and have to be destroyed, Glenn Beck and a gaggle of right-wing commentators and activists joined him last night for a live Election Night broadcast on his Blaze TV network.

For the first few hours, the mood was jovial and confident as Beck munched on ice cream to celebrate the breaking of his forty day fast and served up meals to others who did the same.  But then, once the networks called the state of Pennsylvania for President Obama and started eliminating some of the other states that Romney supporters thought would propel his campaign to victory, the mood on set took a somber turn as everyone involved began to realize that all of their hopes and predictions were slowly being dashed. 

And soon all discussion turned to the question of what went wrong, as the mystified participants tried to make sense of what they were seeing, leading Jerry Boykin to declare that the entire election was invalid because some members of the military supposedly were unable to vote and prompting Beck to speculate that America will not survive another decade if conservatives do not gain control over the nation's public education system.

But mostly Beck was just demoralized, saying that the result demonstrate that "the body of America is even sicker than I thought it was" and declaring that he no longer can say that he knows who Americans are:

On yesterday's radio program, Glenn Beck said that America is on the verge of reaping God's wrath and declared that if the American people are "so dead inside that they can no longer see the difference between good and evil" and re-elect a demagogue like President Obama, then "we have to be destroyed because we will be a remarkable evil on this planet":

If you look at history through a biblical world view, the last step before a nation is completely destroyed is they drive the righteous from among them. If this isn’t a sign of a group of people that will drive the righteous from among them, and that’s the last step before God’s wrath comes, I fear for our country and it is - it cannot be overstated, it cannot be called paranoid ... If you are a God‑fearing person, hear me. Last call, America. Last call. Because the righteous will be driven from among them.

They are nasty, divisive and, I'm sorry, but there is no way to describe that quote from Valerie Jarrett other than evil. Warning: Saul Alinsky is just the beginning of these people.

But I believe in the American people. I believe that we are not too far gone. I believe that people can watch and see the difference. They can feel the difference. When you watch Barack Obama, you can just see he is angry. When you watch Mitt Romney, you can see he is not. We are not an angry nation. We don’t listen to demagogues like that. It doesn’t work. No matter how much power he has amassed, no matter how many friends in the media he has, Americans know. And if they reject it this time, if they’re so dead inside - that’s a possibility - if they’re so dead inside that they can no longer see the difference between good and evil, we have to be destroyed because we will be a remarkable evil on this planet.