Offering his audience unambiguous evidence that his logic disconnects from even the most convoluted reasoning, Friday morning on his radio show, Glenn Beck likened the BP oil spill to a house fire.
"If a house burnt down, would we stop building houses?"
Sure we would, Glenn...
If the blaze raged on for over a month.
if the burning house caused the worst environmental disaster in history and there were no firemen who had any idea how to put it out.
if 70 miles of coastline had been contaminated by the house fire.
if millions of gallons of oil spilled out of the house.
if the inferno was ten times worse than Katrina.
if the flames from the house destroyed tens of thousands of fish, birds and nutria, annihilating a region's marine food chain and perhaps affecting wildlife for as long as a century.
if the fire put thousands of people whose livelihood was based on shoreline revenues on to the unemployment roles.
if the people who were in charge of putting out the fire caused the fire.
Don't you see how well Glenn's analogy works?
No? Well perhaps his climb all over President Obama's calling to suspend deep sea drilling will change your mind.
After playing a tape of President Obama saying that drilling in waters would be suspended, Beck seamlessly expanded that into intimating the President was speaking about ALL oil drilling, reminding his listeners that Rockefeller had drilled for oil. Yes, I know John D never drilled a mile down into an ocean, but that didn't matter as the essence of Glenn's argument was not the relationship of drilling to wealthy oilmen as it was of his overwhelming success of pitching nonsensical crap to a massive audience that eats it up in shovel fulls. To not suspend under water oil drilling until you find the cause as well as a manner of plugging up the spill should it happen again would be criminally negligent. Only a madman or an egregiously callous snake-oil pitchman would even consider it an legitimate argument.
Even if Glenn were to defend his embarrassingly inept rant as his unique brand of hilarity, sarcasm to make a point is not humor if the basis of your joke is hysterically flawed. An "airplane food" joke would never work if all airlines fed every passenger from the first class kitchen. But this was no joke. This was purely a heartless disregard for those affected by the spill. A house fire is not anywhere near the level of an economic and environmental disaster. Will he next equate an ingrown toenail to the Holocaust? Stay tuned.
Equating the oil spill to the dropping of a glass of wine on a rug, one of his radio playmates chided. "Accidents happen,"
Unfortunately, Glenn Beck is an accident that has already burned out of control.
Award-winning TV writer Steve Young is author of "Great Failures of the Extremely Successful" www.greatfailure.com and blogs at the appropriately-named SteveYoungonPolitics.com