Surprising nobody, Glenn Beck spent an entire segment of his radio broadcast this morning attacking First Lady Michelle Obama for daring to address America’s enduring struggle with racism and prejudice in her commencement address at Tuskegee University in Alabama over the weekend.
After playing a few excerpts from Obama’s speech, Beck and his co-hosts accused the first lady of hating America and of attempting to justify the behavior of those who rioted in Baltimore instead of delivering a message that told graduates that, despite whatever problems this nation may have, they can overcome them and still manage to achieve great things.
That, of course, was exactly the message of Obama’s speech, but Beck chose to ignore that so that he could instead accuse her of trying to foment racial tension in an effort to drag this nation back to the 1960s.
“White people in droves went out to vote for you,” Beck fumed, “and you were somehow invisible so much that you became the president and first lady of the United States of America? Tell me about the troubles that you have seen!”
“The whites have never felt it,” Beck said, mocking the idea that only black people have felt the slights of discrimination and bigotry. “I mean, the conservatives have never felt it! The jobs that we are suddenly bypassed for because we’re conservative, because of our viewpoint. The religious that are mocked on a daily basis and belittled. Yeah, we’ve never felt that. We don’t know what it’s like.”
“We are not the country of Martin Luther King’s time any more,” Beck bellowed. “We are being dragged back to those days”:
