Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Hudson: Holy Deductive Reasoning, Batman! Roger Ebert Unravels Beck/Palin Plot

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In an opinion piece at the NewsReal Blog, Walter Hudson comments on the apparent deterioration of Chicago-Sun Times film critic Roger Ebert's ability to recognize the distinction between the fictional world of Hollywood movies and the real world in which most of the rest of us live:
I would like nothing more than to peruse an Ebert blog post which contained a substantive, challenging argument. To satisfy, it wouldn’t have to be an argument I agreed with, just one where the point of disagreement could be taken seriously.

[...]

Ebert soon drifts into complete irrelevancy. In the process, he takes us through a connect-the-dots breakdown of an insidious plot by Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin which sounds like it could have been written for Adam West’s 1960′s Batman.
The new issue of Vanity Fair mentions in its profile of Sarah Palin, as a casual aside, that Glenn Beck has booked the Dena’ina Center, the largest venue in Anchorage, for the date of September 11, 2010. What do you think that means?…

…it cannot be a coincidence that he has chosen 9/11. Nor does it take special insight to connect that date with Palin’s many statements about the “Ground Zero Mosque” and the even more pointed “9/11 Mosque.” The association is obvious: “9/11″ feeds into “mosque” feeds into “Muslims” feeds into the misperception that Obama is a Muslim. Beck and Palin speak about “taking back America.” The buried message is that they will take it back from Muslims. This is a heartless misuse of the tragedy of 9/11 and its victims.

… The symbolic date of 9/11 invests this event with the inescapable possibility that he and Palin plan to announce their Presidential candidacy for 2012.
Someone close to Ebert ought to be reigning him in at this point. Publicly employing this kind of Scooby Doo logic is just too embarrassing. Unless the intent is comedy, some editorial discretion is in order.
Read the full Walter Hudson blog post here.

- JP

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