Antonin Scalia and Glenn Beck: Just Two Degrees of Radical Separation

By GottaLaff

Your Daily Dose of BuzzFlash, via my pal Mark Karlin:

Scalia portrays himself as a "strict constructionist," but he -- like Glenn Beck -- is a far fringe extremist who the right wing has successfully shifted into mainstream credibility. Scalia and Beck just have different venues.

Most recently, Scalia [...] astonished Constitutional scholars and non-Christians alike in a case regarding a cross on public land allegedly honoring veterans. [...]

Scalia, a Supreme Court Justice who one would assume would defend the separation of church and state in the Constitution, "reassured" the congregation that Jews would have nothing to fear from a Christian America because no Christian nation had ever persecuted the Jews.

Uh, Hitler, the Inquisition, the Pogroms, Ghettos...the man isn't brilliant, as the esteemed Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has called him, he's a radical danger to the Republic. He already did 8 years of damage with installing of Bush as president.

But what's to be remembered here is that in the world of the Washington elite -- Democratic and Republican -- Scalia is considered a legal wizard, respectable, part of the establishment.

Similarly, we are seeing a process whereby the extremist, incendiary entertainer and demagogue, Glenn Beck, has moved from basically a provocateur of a militia movement to the cover of Time and interviews with Katie Couric. [...]

No, Beck is not going anywhere except to become more of an accepted "star" in the media world. The corporate mainstream media has, over decades, ignored and dismissed anyone on the left it considers fringe, but embraces demagogues on the right and legitimatizes them.

That's one of the reasons BuzzFlash started the Turn Off Fox in public places campaign, which we plan to grow into a larger initiative to marginalize FOX in particular, which is basically 24 hours of corporate demagoguery that brainwashes Americans who are susceptible to emotional manipulation and bias that favors entrenched wealth. [...]

It's time to return FOX and the entire dangerous-to-America, fringe GOP apparatus to the disreputable margins of society. That's why we started the Turn Off FOX campaign.

There's only two degrees of separation between Glenn Beck and Antonin Scalia. Until the radical right wing is discredited, they both will be embraced by the wealthy corporate media as reputable.

And that is of great risk and harm to democracy.

You can read the rest of Mark's excellent post here.