Glenn Beck Book Review Part I

In a recent post I made a comment about having taken out a Glenn Beck book from the library, and though it was meant to be funny, it was a true statement.  So here I will present my first book review. ***SPOILER ALERT*** He’s batshit crazy.

The book is called “Arguing With Idiots.”  It’s meant to arm the reader with the tools for responding to their idiot liberal friends that constantly corner them at dinner parties and want the poor reader to go on welfare and marry a gay person.

I get dirty looks when I carry this book around with me, including from my librarian when I checked it out*, but that’s to be expected.  If I saw another person carrying this book, even on a day when I was carrying it myself, I would probably sneer at them.  However, it’s my friends who know full well that I hate the guy but still scoff at me for reading it that bothers me.  How can I refute him if I don’t know what he says?  Even more importantly, one of my favorite things to criticize the followers of people like Glenn Beck for is how closed-minded they are.  I believe that they blindly follow people like Limbaugh and Beck without looking at the other side.  It would be hypocritical of me to not read Glenn Beck’s book.  If we want to criticize the other side for not looking at both, we can’t not look at both sides ourselves.   Am I getting too serious?  Sorry.  Back to the nonsense starting now:

The book is quite brilliant in several ways.  The format is that Glenn will present the idiot liberal’s argument and then refute it.  It’s brilliant because it means he gets to state the idiot liberal’s argument, and he gets to misstate it as outlandishly as he wants.  He can simply botch the idiot liberal’s point, and then it’s easy to counter.   I’m not that far into it, but I have yet to see an idiot liberal’s argument that I agree with.  I would gladly disprove any of the arguments that are supposedly made by me, the idiot liberal.

One of his recitations of my arguments so far was simply “Your precious capitalism has failed.”   I swear I’ve never gone up to one of my republican friends at a dinner party and said anything even close to that.  Even if I thought it was true, that’s not an argument at all; it’s just economic trash talk.  I save my trash talk for the Ultimate Frisbee field.   When it comes to economics, I’m all heart.  Even worse than his misinterpretation is his failure to counter even that particular fake liberal argument.  He makes a couple meaningless points about irrelevant issues, and then his entire refutation boils down to “I would argue that it was the existing regulations that failed.”  But he doesn’t then argue that.  He states that he would argue it and then he moves on without doing so.  I was all excited to read Why he would argue that, but he just never got around to it.

Shortly thereafter, the argument that I, the idiot liberal, make is that “Sure, there’s a lot of bureaucracy in government, but it can be streamlined.”  That’s the best I can do?   That’s seriously my argument?  I can’t believe that just came out of my mouth.  I am literally losing an argument to Glenn Beck right now.  I think what’s happening is that as I argue with this man, all of my concentration is focused on not doing him physical harm, and so this garbage is just pouring uncontrollably out of my mouth.

One final note for now is that a running theme in this book is for Glenn to make fun of nerds, scholars, and intellectuals.  At one point in the side margin he includes a “special note for academics and crazy people,” while a few pages later he admits in another side note that if you “ask a political-science nerd,” they might disagree, to which he responds, “Whatever.”  A few pages after that he makes the facetious argument on behalf of the idiot liberal that “Are you saying that we shouldn’t listen to highly educated and trained linguists?”  In answer to that clearly idiotic question he criticizes the use of “relying on gobbledygook from the faculty lounge.”  Are we arguing with idiots or making fun of nerds here?  I guess we’re required to hate both the intelligent and the unintelligent.  The world of Glenn Beck seems only to have room for the C-average, absolute peak of the bell curve.  It’s time for America to achieve her true potential by becoming a nation of people that could have gotten A’s if they applied themselves, but are happy to coast along with C’s.  Maybe we can start grading the economy on a curve.

*My librarian actually gives me dirty looks for every book I take out.  A few months ago I checked out a book called “How to Cheat at Everything.”  It was a satirical title.  The book was really just an inside look at the world of both small and big cons, and how and why to avoid them.  I would think a librarian of all people would get a satirical title when she saw one, but she gave me a look that said she believed I was going to run out of there and attempt to cheat at literally everything.