Okay, I realize the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive…
Anyway, in this video, Glenn tries to bring up that old trope about frogs not jumping out of gradually heating water vs boiling water, which I think those brainless jingoists use to say that the reason Obama isn’t turning us into communist nazis even though he is, is because he is, we just can’t tell, because he’s doing it slowly. That makes sense if you read it through a few times. Also, you have to have frontal lobe brain damage.
To demonstrate this, I guess, it looks like he takes a frog and drops it in some boiling water, expecting it to jump out.
Except it doesn’t jump out. It dies.
Now, it’s certainly possible that it was staged, some simple slight-of-hand and pretending to be surprised, since we don’t actually see the frog go into the water, but the fact that the frog doesn’t jump from the water kind of defeats the point of his whole stupid metaphor.
Unless he was trying to say that the metaphor is wrong, that the frog dies either way. Maybe so as to mean that we are going to die because Obama is the boiling water and taxes are the flame and healthcare is the pot and death panels are the teflon coating. If that’s the point he was trying to make, he failed to make it. When the frog apparently died, he changed topics very quickly. Besides, Beck doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy whose words you need to pore over multiple times to figure out what he really means, like a character on Mad Men.
So there remains the two options, either Beck killed a frog on live tv by throwing it into boiling water, or he’s too stupid to follow his own metaphor past the first ten words.
I’ll grant you that killing a frog is not the same as, say, throwing a puppy off of a cliff. Chefs kill lobsters on TV by dropping them into boiling water all the time. Hell, Alton Brown took out a whole colony of crawfish at once in a recent episode. I’m not really fazed by any of these things. Suffer a few frogs, who gives a shit? I’m not trying to pull some kind of animal-rights-PETA-pity-party here. Fuck the frogs.
I just like to know how Beck’s brain works. If that frog really died, and he thought it wasn’t going to, and he still thought doing it on live TV without trying it out first was a good idea, I can’t vouch for the man’s sanity anymore. It’s easy to assume that he’s just doing an act, like I’m sure Hannity is, to rouse rabble and tow the party line. The problem is, maintaining that kind of act requires lots of work, and brain power to keep the act up (see: Stephen Colbert), and someone expending that kind of brain power would be expected to be able to think that maybe dropping an animal into boiling water on TV, or even pretending to, would not be a good idea.
You wouldn’t expect this kind of thing from a former zookeeper.
How is it that when Beck comes up with these ideas, like pretending to poison the Speaker of the House, or pretending to pour gasoline over someone, trying to say that Rockefeller (the richest man in American history) was a communist because of some incidental art on a building that he, y’know, must have designed himself, nobody in his studio or network ever says, “Hey, umm… let’s not do that”?
If there are people telling him not to do certain things, I shudder to consider them.