Mood:  irritated

watching glenn beck last night, i just had to record it and take some notes. tactics on his show angered me too much to just ignore it--the usual method when watching fox news is to laugh and remind myself these are far right folks who, while they may have an audience, have no actual politica power, so i'll just ignore them for now as best i can

but, glenn beck is talking about obama and healthcare, with a nice drawing of a tree, the roots the people obama supposedly surrounds himself with when considering healthcare. there's a nice clip of obama saying what people he associates himself with when considering economic policy and foreign  policy. but, the clip doesn't establish the people obama claims in connection with his healthcare policy. that is just the first misstep in beck's coverage, inventing his own list of who obama associates with. some, of course, are givens, people in public office, put there by obama, but overall, the links are all beck's invention.

all this, by the way, to compare america to germany, as we are wont to do whenever the administration does something we don't like (hell, i've probably even done it). of course, beck's reasoning there is that what made germany go bad was only two things, money (or the lack thereof) and crazy people. yeah, that's nice and specific, very fair and balanced and informative

so, beck mentions john holdren, obama's advisor on science and technology. see, apparently, in the 70s (mostly written around 73 but published in 77) holdren cowrote a book called ecoscience in which is discussed options for, among other things, population control if overpopulation gets too far out of control. the book presents mostly hypotheticals and goes into political, legal, and social ramifications of certain options like forced abortions, sterilants in the water and laws regulating how many children a woman can have. the thing is, the book, even in the excerpts cited by someone denouncing it (http://zombietime.com/john_holdren/) is clearly not presenting a plan for what should or will be done. the book is not an opinion piece establishing that holdren or his 2 coauthors believe we need to start forcing abortions and sterilization. and, the book does actually suggest that social change would be a better plan, changing society so that people want to have less children

of course, i've just presented more information than beck did. one of his guests says that holdren said some things in writing once about drastic measures for population control. beck mentions forced abortion and sterilants in drinking water than asks (because asking a question is a handy way of accusing someone of something without outright saying it) if it was holdren or sunstein (cass sunstein, office of information and regulatory affairs, who beck says he likes the ideas of, but presents as one of the "crazy" roots here because he is a friend of peter singer, author of animal liberation), on the root next to holdren who said we should take children away from unwed and unfit mothers (yes, that last one is also in the ecoscience book, and sounds a lot like what we try to do already, when are child and family services organizations run effiiciently anyway). one of his guests says, oh that couldn't be sunstein, so it must have been holdren. it's still just vague enough that they haven't actually accused holdren of supporting forced abortion. but then, 10 minutes later, when the caption at the bottom of the screen informs the enraged (either at beck or at holdren, depending on one's political bent, of course) viewer that holdren "does not support population control" beck has already used holdren as a way to explain how the green movement's involvement as one of obama's healthcare tree roots (a connection he doesn't bother to explain in itself; in fact, though the diagram seems to be of beck's design, he says he couldn't figure out the green movement connection until he figured out what follow) makes sense because the green movement thinks people are a virus (which of course fits with holdren's notion that we need to control population, even as the timing of beck making this connection comes about 20 seconds before the screen informs us first that holdren said forced abortion was constitutional (he did) then that holdren does not support population control

that last fact, which of course doesn't come up in anything beck or his guests say out loud, is in line with official statement from holdren's people, that the material about forced abortion, etcetera, comes from "a three decade old, three author college textbook. dr holdren does not believe that determining optimal population is a proper role of government [(this bit, he said in his confirmation hearing)]. dr holdren is not and never has been an advocate for policies of forced sterilization." his coauthors, the ehrlichs, have pointed out that they "were not then, never have been, adn are not now 'advocates' of the draconian measures for population limitation described--but not recommended--in the book's 6o plus small type pages cataloging the full spectrum of population policies that, at the time, has either been tries in some country or analyzed by some commentator." as the back cover of ecoscience says, the point to the book is to provide "concrete strategies for dealing with the environmental crisis" not to support any of those strategies

but, what does the reality matter, as beck just used holdren (who he didn't quite accuse of supporting forced abortion outright) to make the green movement sound bad, just as he used peter singer to make sunstein sound bad, and all these roots to make obama sound bad. and, all of this without really getting into even one thing obama has actually said or done regarding healthcare