Fucking Moronic Quote of the Day: Glenn Beck and the conservative civil rights movement

Double facepalm [click for full size [560×422]]

I know I’ve only just made a Fail Quote post for today, but this is so fucking stupid that I just had to make a second to accommodate it. From the ever-reality-impaired Glenn Beck:

Beck: I told you this summer that we are going to concentrate on restoring history. The history of our nation, the founding, the 20th century, the Depression era, um, and the Civil Rights Movement, which has been co-opted by progressives. [my emphasis]

If you ever needed quantifiable evidence that Glenn Beck is both historically clueless and completely insane, here’s a good place to start. So, according to him, the civil rights movement that fought the battle for desegregation and women’s rights (amongst other things) was co-opted by progressives? As in, liberals just took the credit for it, or hijacked it, as though the original fight for social reform were a conservative movement?!

Here’s a challenge for anyone as incredibly deluded as Beck: name me one single person, event or result from the civil rights movement that was conservative in nature. Just one. It’s complete bullshit; the entire movement, and all those who took a part in it, such as Martin Luther King Jr., were fundamentally and blatantly progressive. It was the liberals of the day who were fighting for change – fighting against social conservatives, in case that needed clarifying. Conservatism, as flawed and illogical as it is, has always been about just that: conserving the status of society and those in it and striving to keep everything the same. And, of course, demonizing anyone who had the idea to work for progress – hence the hatred thrown towards progressives like the shit from rabid monkeys.

The idea that liberals and progressives somehow took credit for an originally conservative civil rights movement is downright insane. Glenn Beck is so desperate to jump on the accomplishments of liberalism for conservatives’ gain and harp all the credit for the Right that he is perfectly willing, if not plainly eager, to throw away the facts and recognized historical perspectives in order to smear the Left and all that it works for. Of course, it’s only amusing to think that whatever the Left is fighting for at the moment that the Right is raging and stonewalling against, the same Rightists will be all-too-happy to try and usurp the credit for those same accomplishments in the future. Conservatism is an ideology of crankery and selfishness, as it always has been. People like Glenn Beck, whilst not exactly representative of the whole, are just its inevitable epitome.

(via Dispatches From the Culture Wars)