Glenn Beck Wrote A Book, Insulted Imus During an Interview; Nothing Ever Changes

That Glenn Beck would mock Imus for “always selling something” on the morning he appears with Imus to sell his THIRD BOOK THIS YEAR, Broke, is nothing if not ironic.
 
So, Imus mocked back. “How many fingers am I holding up?” he asked Beck, who recently disclosed that his eyesight is slowly degenerating.
 
And in case Beck didn’t feel bad enough, Imus bragged that Bill O’Reilly had agreed to appear on this program every Tuesday until Christmas. Beck offered his own services on a weekly basis, but Imus flat-out rejected him, saying, “We’re committed to Bill.”
 
But for the next 15 minutes or so, he was committed to Beck, whose book Broke is divided into three parts based on questions people ask him all the time: How did we get here as a nation? Is it really as bad as you say it is? What are you going to do about it?
 
“The whole system is broken; everything’s got to change,” said Beck, insisting Broke is not political. Not that it mattered, since Imus, who Beck likened to an emperor, was just barely listening. “You don’t look fat and mushy,” Imus observed of the book’s cover picture.
 
The answer to, “How did we get here?” can best be answered by pointing to Andrew Jackson, Beck explained. “He was the first one, I think, that stopped looking at divine providence, and we started looking at manifest destiny,” he said. “We had this attitude of, get out of our way, we’re on a mission from God. And that gave us the right, in our own heads, to kill all the Indians and everything else that we wanted, and take all the land.”
 
He pointed to that time as the birth of an American arrogance that is visible today. Beck brushed off accusations that his rhetoric has incited violence this election cycle (“You’ve got to be kidding me”), and offered that the negativity on both sides of the political divide will never be cured unless people realistically deal with this country’s history.
 
“If we don’t address the things we have done in our past, and if we’re not honest with each other, we’re never going to get past anything,” he said. “The idea that America is a horrible place is ridiculous. The idea that we just wave the flag in the air and say, ‘USA! USA!’ and we’ve always been great—we haven’t been. That’s ridiculous too.”
 
But is it as ridiculous as the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert “Rally to Restore Sanity” taking place this weekend on the Mall in Washington, DC? Beck, who held his own gigantic rally back in August, doesn’t really care, but wished Stewart luck in an e-mail last night.
 
“I don’t know if he’ll be struck the same way I was—it’s a humbling experience,” he said. “You stand there, and you’re facing the Washington monument that’s a mile away, and you hear your voice slam against the Monument and come back at you. It’s pretty humbling.”
 
While Imus is willing to take the comedians’ word that their rally is not political, Beck is not. “It’s been absolutely co-opted,” he said. “I think they’re in dangerous waters.”
 
Imus causally wondered how Beck’s family was doing, and was met with a sarcastic invitation to stop by the Beck household, cough on the children, and give them cancer.
 
“Are any of them between 11 and 17?” Imus said. “Because they’d be eligible to come to the ranch.”
 
Disturbed, Beck uncomfortably replied, “They can come visit when they are, but I’m giving them a rape whistle.”
 
-Julie Kanfer