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Tuesday's Wall Street Journal's top headline screamed, "Pay Czar Targets Salary Cuts. The Journal, a recent acquisition of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, which also owns Fox News, was supposed to remain pristine pure journalistically. That was the promise when the family which held it sold it.
But that headline is pure echo of the meme Fox News psycho screech pundit Glen Beck has been screaming on a daily basis, that Obama has appointed "Czars, Czars and More Czars" to run the government. In a conversation with rightwing extremist hate blogger Michelle Malkin, Beck, after warning that he is "riddled with ADD, states,
"The first option with these czars is they're a collection of stupid people. They're a collection of people that are just like the ambassadors. A lot of times presidents will say, oh, jeez, here's a guy from high school and he helped raise money and, you know, we're friends, but he's a pain in the ass; can we send him to Zimbabwe. And so they give him a presidential appointment to become the ambassador of Zimbabwe and they just make the guy go away. And he has no real power and it's just, you know, it's a favor for somebody. The second thing is that this is we are developing a Chicagolike system in our republic that we are developing a system here that is going to be just dirty, underhanded, and Chicago politics. The third is really on the road to crazy town and that is a lot of these people are evil people that just have no respect for the republic in any way, shape or form and are going to fundamentally transform the nation and feast on the republic until they have an emergency that they just don't want to, they just don't want to waste and they will have all of the pieces that they need to start some engine of something we don't want to see started up.I"ve spoken to Beck listeners-- I call them "Beck Brains"-- and they parrot Beck's delusional paranoid rantings about the evil czars, tied with ideas of revolution, military coup, government takeover by the left or right.
...some of these czars have things that are so frightening in their past that no American if these guys were being appointed by George W. Bush, the left would be on fire with this and they would be calling them Nazis and everything else."
Now, we have Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal using its front page to pump the Beck Czar meme. Some might argue that the use of the word czar has been around. But we're not talking about an ordinary situation here. We're dealing with a world wide conglomerate run by a right wing extremist who has fine-tuned the use of multi-media messaging to accomplish goals.
Anti-Beck forces have persuaded scores of advertisers to stop running ads on the Beck show, yet Murdock keeps it going and growing. The history of the right wing media is clear. Conservative billionaires will spend hundreds of millions of dollars backing right wing media stars, like Rush Limbaugh, allowing their shows to operate though they are hemorrhaging tens of millions in losses annually. What better way to strengthen the Beck message than to insert it into one of the most influential, profitable newspapers?
Is it an accident? You do the figuring.
