Glenn Beck--a stupendously ignorant, misogynistic little man who just called a whole lot of women "prostitutes".

Listening to Glenn Beck is difficult for me, because I have this tendency to think about things that I hear. Also, I don't regularly watch Beck's tv show or listen to his radio show because, for the most part, why do something I find really unpleasant? So I usually only catch snippets of him at his act, and the head-spinning changes in tone that make me just look at him as a basically crapulent fake probably stand out more for me because I don't see any "in-between". You know, the way stop-motion footage speeds up action, the gaps between Beck's tragedy and comedy masks makes it seem like he's just not for real.  There's his teary-eyed, faux-noble, swellingly patriotic and religious routine--and then there's his total chuckle-headed Morning Zoo crass offensiveness.

I found this clip of Glenn Beck at his crassest regarding Planned Parenthood pretty interesting, though:


Basically, Glenn Beck seems to assume that women who use the services of Planned Parenthood must be prostitutes, or at least, dreadfully promiscuous. The argument that they might simply be people who possess a female reproductive system and need affordable care doesn't seem to move him. Well, actually, that idea seems laughable to him.  Because there is nothing funnier than a woman thinking she might have breast cancer, AIDS, be pregnant with the absolutely wrong man's child, and needing help--as if it were a matter of life and death or something!  Hah, hah....sigh.  Just because for some women it is doesn't mean we can't get a good hearty laugh out of their situation and call them prostitutes, right Glenn?

(Which is another layer of stupid, already--since sex workers are people who need health care too! Duh. But of course he doesn't mean prostitutes are necessarily bad people that should die of diseases and whatnot. No.  He's talking about all women who have used Planned Parenthood. So he really thinks all women who don't have a ready alternative can just die, already.  He's not hardly the discriminating asshole one might suppose!)

His recycled crap about Margaret Sanger is so old that Planned Parenthood has a page for debunking it on their website.  I'm not even going to get into his apparent resentment of Larry O'Donnell for some reason. And his stupidity about the costs of birth control and the business about condoms and disease get right back to his willful ignorance about who Planned Parenthood serves--some of these women are married or in a committed relationship--not hooking up with a series of random strangers. And his "tearful", giggling depiction of a woman distraught because she might not have access to an abortion is just...basically vicious and disgusting.   Real people face that situation of limited access. Real people have deeply personal reasons why they do not need to carry and bear a baby--and his mockery of them is an insult laid on top of an injurious situation.

I really didn't want to blog about Beck, and his "transitioning out" of his tv show, after a precipitous drop in its ratings (losing what--half it's viewership?) the loss of several radio markets (like here, in Philadelphia, a market he once considered "home"), and falling book sales. I was ready to let his departure from our tv screens go quietly, unremarked by me, as a natural occurrence: Fox Mushroom Farm simply retiring an old manure shovel for a more effective bullshit spreader. But it's little insights like that, little glimpses into how he must view people, that make me wonder how he ever became so popular.  It is a puzzle.

And yet I don't wonder how people have gotten a little tired of him. You can serve up bullshit to people for a surprisingly long time--so long as they never actually see a cow's ass, put one and one together, and realize they've been served number two.  Glenn Beck is a cow's ass.