Link to Original Story

Op-Ed Columnist
America Is Better Than This

By BOB HERBERT

America is better than Glenn Beck. For all of his celebrity, Mr. Beck is an ignorant, divisive, pathetic figure. On the anniversary of the great 1963 March on Washington he will stand in the shadows of giants — Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Who do you think is more representative of this nation?

Consider a brief sampling of their rhetoric.

Lincoln: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

King: “Never succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter.”

Beck: “I think the president is a racist.”

Washington was on edge on the morning of Aug. 28, 1963. The day was sunny and very warm and Negroes, as we were called in those days, were coming into town by the tens of thousands. The sale of liquor was banned. Troops stood by to restore order if matters got out of control. President John F. Kennedy waited anxiously in the White House to see how the day would unfold.

It unfolded splendidly. The crowd for the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” grew to some 250,000. Nearly a quarter of the marchers were white. They gathered at the Lincoln Memorial, where they were enthralled by the singing of Mahalia Jackson and Joan Baez. The march was all about inclusion and the day seemed to swell with an extraordinary sense of camaraderie and good feeling.

The climax, of course, was Dr. King’s transcendent “I Have a Dream” speech. Jerald Podair, a professor of American studies at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, has called Aug. 28, 1963, “the most important single day in civil rights history.” This is the historical legacy that Glenn Beck, a small man with a mean message, has chosen to tread upon with his cynical rally on Saturday at that very same Lincoln Memorial.

Beck is a provocateur who likes to play with matches in the tinderbox of racial and ethnic confrontation. He seems oblivious to the real danger of his execrable behavior. He famously described President Obama as a man “who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.”

He is an integral part of the vicious effort by the Tea Party and other elements of the right wing to portray Mr. Obama as somehow alien, a strange figure who is separate and apart from — outside of — ordinary American life. As the watchdog group Media Matters for America has noted, Beck said of the president, “He chose to use the name, Barack, for a reason, to identify not with America — you don’t take the name Barack to identify with America. You take the name Barack to identify, with what? Your heritage? The heritage, maybe, of your father in Kenya, who is a radical?”

Facts and reality mean nothing to Beck. And there is no road too low for him to slither upon. The Southern Poverty Law Center tells us that in a twist on the civil rights movement, Beck said on the air that he “wouldn’t be surprised if in our lifetime dogs and fire hoses are released or opened on us. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few of us get a billy club to the head. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of us go to jail — just like Martin Luther King did — on trumped-up charges. Tough times are coming.”

He makes you want to take a shower.

In Beck’s view, President Obama is driven by a desire to settle “old racial scores” and his ultimate goal is “reparations” for black Americans. Abe Lincoln and Dr. King could only look on aghast at this clown.

Beck has been advertising his rally as nonpolitical, but its main speaker is Sarah Palin. She had her own low moment recently as a racial provocateur, publicly voicing her support for Laura Schlessinger, radio’s “Dr. Laura,” who went out of her way to humiliate a black caller by continuously using the n-word to make a point, even after the caller had made it clear that she was offended.

Palin’s advice to Schlessinger: “Don’t retreat — reload.”

There is a great deal of hatred and bigotry in this country, but it does not define the country. The daily experience of most Americans is not a bitter experience and for all of our problems we are in a much better place on these matters than we were a half century ago.

But I worry about the potential for violence that grows out of unrestrained, hostile bombast. We’ve seen it so often. A little more than two weeks after the 1963 March on Washington, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan and four young black girls were killed. And three months after the march, Jack Kennedy was assassinated.

My sincere advice to Beck, Palin and their followers is chill, baby, chill.

From the New York Times...

Link to Original Story

Op-Ed Columnist
Mr. Simpson Has a Cow

By GAIL COLLINS

What are we to make of Alan Simpson, the co-chairman of President Obama’s deficit reduction commission, who recently referred to Social Security as “a milk cow with 310 million tits”?

Personally, I would love for us to have a national cow with that sort of milk-giving capacity. But Simpson, who gets very impatient with people who want to preserve current Social Security benefits, did not mean it as a compliment. Now, his remark is getting a lot of attention, and that is only partly because the rest of the news has been so depressing that Bristol Palin’s rumored agreement to compete on “Dancing With the Stars” was a high point of the week.

Simpson, 78, is a former Republican senator known for his outspokenness — he once called the American Association of Retired Persons “the greedy geezers of America.” In appointing him co-chairman of the president’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, the White House broke an important political rule, which is to keep away from anyone who considers himself a colorful old codger.

Colorful codgers can be a welcome diversion in mediocre situation comedies, but you do not want one to be the public face of your deficit reduction commission. He might do something crazy, like e-mailing an activist for older American women, to accuse her of “babbling into the vapors,” then make disparaging remarks about well-endowed dairy animals and conclude with: “Call when you get honest work!”

Simpson was responding to a Huffington Post article by Ashley Carson, the executive director of the Older Women’s League. In it, Carson criticized Simpson’s support for reducing Social Security benefits. She also slammed his “record of sexism” and “his constant bashing of seniors.”

Carson’s post had been published in April. So besides writing an e-mail that confirmed all of her worst charges, Simpson was also choosing to get involved in a fight whose expiration date had long since kicked in. Perhaps he was in a bad mood because his son had just lost a gubernatorial primary to the grandson of another former United States senator. To make matters worse, the younger Simpson came in fourth, behind people who were not even direct descendants of major state politicians.

After his e-mail rant was made public, Simpson apologized in his colorful old codger way. (“Over the last 40 years I have had my size 15 feet in my mouth a time or two.”) But that did not stop the demands that he resign or be fired.

So far, Obama is sticking with his deficit-reduction co-chairman. He picked Simpson for the job because he is a Republican willing to talk about Social Security tax increases, a breed rarer than the ivory-billed woodpecker. The administration was obviously hoping that the commission would come up with a bipartisan plan that would combine a rise in payroll taxes with a modest reduction in benefits. The system is supposed to run out of money in 2037, and if we could fix it now, the pain would be much more modest than if Congress waited until, say, January of 2038.

This is so totally contrary to the current culture of Washington that it seems sort of touching that anybody might imagine it can happen. However, there is too much negativity in the world these days. I hereby offer a two-part proposal for fixing Social Security:

MORE ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS Immigration in general is a Social Security plus, since new arrivals tend to be young, and likely to contribute to the retirement system through payroll taxes for a long time before they start collecting. But illegal immigrants never get to collect at all. Their money only goes one way, toward benefits for the rest of us. Arizona retirees, tear down your walls.

TAX LONGER LIVES Some experts, including people in the administration, believe that Congress should raise the age at which people can retire on full Social Security benefits, which is currently 66 and will rise to 67 for younger workers. Personally, I will be happy to rally around this idea the very second that the White House announces there is a large pool of job opportunities for unemployed 60-year-olds that are going begging.

The theory behind raising the retirement age is that people are living longer these days. However, the Americans who do all this extra living tend to be wealthier than the ones who expire before they can cash their first pension check. Right now, only the first $106,800 in annual income is taxed for Social Security. Get rid of the cap, and you will be making the folks who are causing most of the problem pay for the solution.