Glenn Beck’s response on his radio program this morning to yesterday’s mass shooting at a community college in Oregon was rather schizophrenic.
After spending the first hour of the show reading a prayer to God and telling his audience not to focus on the anger and hatred that seemingly motivated the attack, but rather to hold up those who reacted heroically, Beck then spent an entire segment discussing his acquisition of a golden ticket from the movie “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” during which he grew increasingly emotional and teary-eyed as he recounted the plot of the film, especially the climatic line, “so shines a good deed in a weary world.”
After urging his listening audience to focus on those who did just this sort of a “good deed” in the wake of the shooting instead of focusing on the negative, Beck then returned from a commercial break and spent the next segment furiously attacking President Obama as a small, sad, and pathetic man for daring to politicize this nation’s seemingly endless wave of mass killings.
“I just have to tell you this, and I believe I speak by commandment,” Beck said, without a hint of irony. “Stop listening to the liars.”
He then played a clip of Obama speaking yesterday about the shooting, saying that these mass killings are “something we should politicize,” and then proceeded to spend ten minutes ripping the president to shreds.
“This is the history of this man,” he declared. “It’s obscene! And it’s time we start saying those words. ‘Mr. President, that is obscene. We deserve better than this. We demand better than this.’ … This man just came out and said this needs to be politicized! I refuse to be divided by him anymore. He is a very small, sad man.”
“He is not worth your time,” Beck continued. “It is really, truly sad to see how little our president had made himself and how little he has made the presidency of the United States. It is truly sad and pathetic.”
