Glenn Beck Calls His Wife An Adulterous Slut

In a comment about President Obama’s over-exposure in the media, talk show host Glenn Beck said the following:

“We just didn’t see [President Obama] enough. … The man was everyplace. The only place he didn’t show up in was my bedroom to personally talk to my wife and make sweet love to her. At least I don’t think he did. I’m pretty sure that was John Edwards doing that, but I’m not sure because so far John Edwards is denying it.”

Let me forestall accusations that I’m a knee-jerk liberal who doesn’t understand that Beck was being funny.

Not true. I know he was being deliberately hyperbolic. (Tea-bagger translation: over the top.)

I know he was trying to be funny.

But, you know, it isn’t funny. And I’m not talking about taking a shot at John Edwards for adultery. Everyone has done that; and we’ve taken shots at plenty of figures on the left and right, from Newt Gingrich and Mark Sanford, John McCain, David Vitter and Rudi Guiliani to JFK and Elliot Spitzer. Politicians can’t keep it in their pants. Fine. Got it. And some of them clearly have *screwed* their brains out. Got that, too. And most of them like *screwing* us and bending over for their corporate masters. Check. As a class, shots at them are not only easy, but fair and even necessary.

As Mark Twain noted back in 1888:

No god and no religion can survive ridicule. No church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field and live.

I get the cleansing power of ridicule. Pour it on.

But how is it funny, for Beck, on national television, to suggest his wife has been getting stud service from John Edwards? (And I won’t even begin to touch the whole hint of Mandigo-racism in the suggestion that President Obama is doing her. Hello KKK nightmare, where’s the sheets, get a rope, find a tree.)

It’s not funny at all.

It is grossly disrespectful of someone Beck purportedly loves, who supports him, makes a home for him. This is a man who weeps because of the decay he sees in the nation, and yet he thinks its funny to suggest his wife has the morals of an alley cat? (Yes, equating someone who would sleep with John Edwards to an alley cat does insult alley cats, my apologies.) (By the way, my last parenthetical, that was funny.)

The reason I point this out is not because I assume Glenn Beck will notice or care. He won’t. I point it out because the man has a lot of influence with a segment of our population. He motivates them. And if he is so caught up in being Glenn Beck, that he is willing to denigrate and publicly humiliate his own wife simply to feed his own ego and rev up his followers, one has to ask if there is a line he won’t cross? Because if there isn’t, if there are no brakes there, and, in an effort to be “funny” he lets slip something that one of his followers sees as a command, some serious damage could be done.

Am I being hyperbolic in that suggestion? I hope to Heaven I’m not, but see if this scenario could hold water for you: a listener so reveres Glenn, that he hears this joke as Glenn calling out to him, telling him that Glenn’s wife has violated the sanctity of their marriage bed. Might that individual not see it as his duty to defend the honor of his champion? Face it, folks have been shot to defend the honor of crack-whores and sports figures, and Beck inspires a lot more passion than either of those classes. One whack-job with a pistol reading into Glenn’s little call out, and the self-proclaimed “rodeo clown” might really have something to weep about.

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