Why liberals can't understand Glenn Beck, and why it matters

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CNBC's Rick Santelli's Chicago Tea Party

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It's too bad that folks on the left can't understand Beck because he articulates what a growing majority of Americans think and feel. That the liberal knee jerk reaction about Beck is that he is another Rush Limbaugh, and this just underscores a monumental misunderstanding of the political movement that frustrates them so much.

The problem is that liberals feel as if Obama's 53% was a mandate for the ushering in of European style social democracy in America, but they fail to grasp the fact that Obama's 53% (1% greater than Bush's 52% in 2004) represents the fact that Obama sold himself as something that we later found out he is not: A slightly left of President Bush moderate.

What Obama did manage to do was to force Americans to re-evaluate their political beliefs, and again this is something that liberals just can't seem to grasp. The fact of the matter is that when the majority of Obama supporters who thought that all of the charges against him such as his alignment with Saul Alinsky, ACORN and the radical black nationalist church he attended, were what liberals told them they were... false charges. The fly in the ointment was that as when Obama changed roles roles from campaigner to President this particular block of voters saw two things: 1) that when Obama did govern he validated the charges made against him by the right during the campaign, and 2) that Obama did a lot more campaigning than governing once elected as President of the United States.

The true history of the Tea Party Movement

CNBC analyst Rick Santelli, reporting from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, went on an epic rant regarding the stimulus package saying, "The government is promoting bad behavior," before turning to the traders on the floor and whipping them up into a frenzy. He also calls for a Chicago Tea Party in July, saying - at the 2:10 mark - "All you capitalists that wanna show up to Lake Michigan, I'm gonna start organizing it...I'll be dumping in some derivative securities..."

You'll get alternate versions all over the internet where Rush Limbaugh Ron Paul are credited with the genesis of the movement, but the fact of the matter is that that is the spin that is merely "believed" to be true by folks who "desire" it to be true.

The Tea Party Movement began as a revolt against the Obama Administration's mortgage bailout plan, pure and simple. The theme was that the government had gone overboard in it's meddling in the free market system, and what followed was actually a naturally flowing chain of events that eventually spilled over into Town Hall meetings where John and Jane Q Public voiced the same concerns about their belief that the federal government had over stepped it's Constitutional authority.

Whether you agree or disagree with what the Tea Party Movement believes, you can not deny the facts regarding how it actually began. Enter Glenn Beck...

Glenn Beck 101

I've been a fan of Glenn beck since his radio days in Tampa Bay Florida, and the truth of the matter is that although Glenn Beck is indeed a true conservative (for lower taxes, limited government and supports a constructionist view of the U.S. Constitution), he is by no means a sock puppet for the GOP. Most of the confusion is the deliberate distortion of facts by liberals who correctly understand Beck to be their political adversary. The problem with that type of thinking is that Beck is anti-liberal and conservative, and not a kool-aid drinking Republican. The difference there being that he often slammed Bush and the GOP for leaning left and abandoning what he felt should have been core Republican principles of Reaganesque conservatism.

Beck grew in popularity because he was speaking to people who already were in line with his vision of what the conservative answer to liberalism should be, and eventually that core following turned into a movement of it's own when he was picked up for TV by Fox News.

The recent vicious and personal attacks on Glenn Beck are a reflection of a misplaced hatred by the left who re-aimed their venom from Bush, who although was no longer a player and increasingly a bad target for said anger, and then went on to the next largest and most effective voice of anti-liberalism in America... Glenn Beck.

Liberals are frustrated for a good reason

I believe that liberals are besides themselves right now because they have convinced themselves that the 2008 Presidential victory of both President Obama and both houses of the United States Congress were a reflection of support of their vision of America, rather than what it really was... anger at both Bush and Republicans who had 8 years to get it right (pardon the pun) and failed to do anything but look like the Democrats that were ejected en-masse in 1994 during the Gingrich revolution - power drunk politicians. The mistake is that they confused a vote against a particular group of politicians, with a vote for their radical left wing agenda.

Add to this the constant abuse of the charge of racism being over-used by Democrats whenever things aren't going as they had hoped, and you can clearly begin to see the crack that naturally followed in their belief system. They are frustrated, but it's because they are besides themselves and unable to accept the aforementioned chain of events that do in fact reflect the reality of the political landscape of America in 2009.