Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin were all worked up yesterday on Beck's Fox News show about the media's treatment of the town-hall protests. They agreed that the media were ignoring all the "union thuggery" caused by rank-and-file health-care-reform supporters from the SEIU who were showing up at the town halls to counter the right's angry mobs:
Malkin: I think there's a purposeful whitewashing, and a narrative that somehow these unions represent blue-collar workers. That has never been the case. They have never represented the best interest of their dues-paying, card-carrying members. It's always been about enriching and enhancing and aggrandizing the management.
And people need to know what they're up against. You need to know your enemy. The SEIU is 1.8 million members strong. And the dues that they have coerced and squeezed from those members have been poured into Democrats' coffers. Andy Stern, who is the radical social worker turned union heavy, bragged that $80 million of SEIU union dues went to the Democrats in independent expenditures, and a huge chunk of that, of course, directly into Obama's campaign treasury.
Right. Because, of course, Malkin's corporate friends in Republicanland would do so much more to protect the interests of working-class people than unions would.
Malkin's claim that unions have "never" been about helping working-class people is of course grotesquely ahistorical, but fairly typical of corporate shills like Malkin. Indeed, if anyone's doing whitewashing, it's Malkin, who like Beck has airbrushed out of their realities the facts about progressives and unions and the central role they have played in creating the great American middle class upon which these two parasites feast.
But most hilarious is the charge that it's the unions who have introduced violence into this scenario, when in fact the entire tone of these protests from the right has been ugly and violent. The presence of SEIU regulars is essentially in response to the threats fomented by the right. After all, it isn't SEIU members who are calling up teabaggers and threatening them with gun violence -- it's the other way around.
This is underscored by the strange coda that Beck gives at the end of the segment:
Beck: You know, um, I have to tell you I think the clock is ticking, gang. I think everybody needs to back away -- not from your passions, not from what you believe in. You believe in health care, you keep going. You believe it's wrong, you keep going.
But we need to be very, very careful. I fear for the future. Somebody's going to do something stupid and it will change the Republic -- [snaps] -- overnight.
One can only assume that he's referencing his previous plea to his audience not to indulge in acts of violence. And as we can see, he has real reason to be concerned.
But just whose side is it with the propensity for violence and thuggery, Glenn and Michelle?
