"A half truth is a whole lie. ~Yiddish Proverb"
A lying tongue hateth [those that are] afflicted by it; and a flattering mouth worketh ruin. -Proverbs 26:28
"It would be ridiculous to think he attended some sort of speaker school; he is a rhetorical genius who developed his own abilities with no help from anyone else. One cannot imagine that the Führer ever spoke differently than he does today, or that he will ever speak differently. He speaks his heart, and therefore reaches the hearts of those who hear him. He has the amazing gift of sensing what is in the air. He has the ability to express things so clearly, logically and directly that listeners are convinced that that is what they have always thought themselves. That is the true secret of the effectiveness of Adolf Hitler’s speeches." - Goebbels
I was shocked to find an admirer of Orwell thinking seriously about a place at the table for Beckistan.
Beck is in the business of propaganda of the worst kind, of using the arts of communication and "pseudo reasoning" (cf. John Stewart classic 20 minute spoof, for example) and so forth to make "voter truths" out of half-truths and outright lies.
His show does not invite people to critical inquiry. To the contrary. It harnesses emotion and bias against reason and dispassionate assessment. (These are NOT "in the way". Just watching his intelligence, one has every reason to believe it is deliberate).
As such, he is no friend to faith or reason.
(His 'more harm than good' is not a serious internal reflection, even less so offered up so publicly, deliberately, so ... willingly. It's a cold, calculated strategy, just as likely. A cold realization that his lying, excused as "inconsistencies", will catch up to him at some point, and for the propaganda to continue, a new "face" for it will have to emerge, a setting of the evolutionary stage. He's a tool in the box of The Will to Power - and he knows it.)
Update: one of the year's must reads, journalist Dana Milbank decodes "the Constitution hangs by a thread". It's Mormon lore for Mormon intervention in time of failure.
