Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America by Dana Milbank Read Free Book Online

revealed and what this people, through listening to the Lord and being obedient, will help to bring about, to stabilize and give permanency and effect to the Constitution itself. That also is our mission.”
    And now Beck’s mission. Secret organizations? Tramping on liberties? Breakdown of law and order? Shredding the Constitution? Betraying the Founders? This is the core of Beck’s message, in his own words: “Some people in the government seem to have a problem, you know, shredding the Constitution. You’re trying to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, friends. It’s in trouble …” They are “going to bring us to the verge of shredding the Constitution, of massive socialism … They see the government as violating the Constitution, and they will see themselves as defenders of the Constitution. Not a good mix. Then they take matters into their own hands.”
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    Beck has often described himself as a mere jester. “I’m basically a rodeo clown just trying to entertain you every night,” he’s been known to say. For most of his career, as a morning-zoo radio DJ, he was nothing more than that.
    “We told our bosses right up front: We don’t need gimmicks to sell the new Y95,” Beck says at the start of a 1986 TV promo for his Phoenix radio show featuring “the new Y95’s zookeepers.” After a toy airplane flies by, Beck offers “plenty of easy contests for you to win lots of free money.” Cash falls from the ceiling and a stuffed bird swings on a rope. As he and his cohost continue, balloons fall from the ceiling, a live monkey swings onto the set, walks onto the desk, and sips coffee, and a mannequin falls from the ceiling. “Hey, with all that talk on the new Y95, who needs gimmicks?” Beck asks.
    The closest he got to substance was offering listeners “your favorite love songs and chances to qualify for a dream trip to Hawaii” (that was on Washington’s WPGC). “Twelve before nine—it’s 8:48 with the A-Team,” he said on a typical Louisville morning on WRKA. “We’ve been asking you to call us up and tell us who do you think has more class, the fans of U of K or the fans of U of L?”
    If Beck had any trace, back then, of his current persona, it was his delight in causing offense. In New Haven, he and his partner made fun of Asian Americans, using a mock accent; the Hartford Advocate reported that the station had to apologize. (The ethnic games have continued. As recently as 2003, he had this to say of Barbra Streisand in his Real America book: “Sometimes I just feel like screaming, ‘Shut up, you big-nosed cross-eyed freak!’ ” And of Joe Lieberman: “I know Joe well. Well, we’re not buddies or anything, not like we’re out buying yarmulkes together.”)
    Beck made a rare foray into public affairs one morning in 1986 after Reagan ordered the bombing of Libya. He and a friend had written a song with the chorus “Gaddafi Sucks, Gaddafi Sucks” and Reagan’s voice saying “Frankly, Gaddafi sucks” over the New Wave music of the time. Beck was tentative: “I originally didn’t want to play it because I felt it was a little too offensive,” he said, “but we’re going to play it here and we’d like to hear what you think.”
    The station was flooded with supportive calls. Caller “Eric” said of Libyan terrorists: “We should bring them back to the United States and publicly execute them, probably just slow torture on world TV.” Eric further proposed: “Give them a couple alternatives like slide them down, down a, well I’m trying to think, a pool of razor blades filled with alcohol. Slowly lower them into a pool of piranhas.”
    Beck was mild in his response. “Thank you Eric, appreciate it, bye-bye,” he said to the angry man. But he had learned that he had the power to rile. “I just want to say, I feel really good,” he said as he signed off the air that morning.
    When, in the 1990s, he moved to Connecticut—where he crashed,