Then you're not visiting all the sites. Seriously. Dip your toe into the forums of the unwashed masses from time to time and you'll see a LOT of Palin/Beck love. You don't even have to go to crazy-ville to see it. Just check article comments on sites like CNN or other news sources.

It could also be that some of their supporters don't post on internet sites.

We should all be taking Palin seriously. It's kind of sad that she's got a shot at the presidency but she really does. If you think she's so laughably stupid that we can ignore her, just imagine if she became the face of America.

They said Bush was an unelectable idiot, too.

No personal anecdotes though, from your lives? Comments can be spammed by a single dude with 15 browser windows.

The converse is also true. If you're an actual Vietnam vet, then you'll never be President. ask Kerry or McCain.

Beck is so insane that he's now actively driving portions of his audience away.

Hey, Kerry had the nerve to get fake medals for getting shot at by imaginary enemy. Of course he didn't get elected. At least that's what the Swiftboat guys told me.

To be fair, Kerry really was a horrible candidate. I'm not sure why they had to go that route to keep him from getting elected.

My dad and stepmom love Palin. They think she's smart as a tack and "tells it like it is".

And despite the common stereotype about Palin supporters, my parents aren't stupid. Both are highly educated, well-travelled and have done relatively well for themselves over the decades. But they're so angry, so disappointed and so frustrated with where this country has gone over the past few years that they're willing to listen to someone like Palin, not so much because of the specifics of what she says, but the kinds of emotions that she channels.

Personally, I think Glenn Beck and Palin are in different leagues. Beck's just a guy with a loud mouth who occasionally says things people agree with. Palin's much more. It's like how, during the 2008 campaign, Obama's candidacy was about more than just a man: He was an idea, a philosophy, a movement. Palin's the same way. She's more than just a woman, she's the face of a movement -- a very angry movement that often gets written off by the mainstream media, but, IMHO, one we ignore at our own peril.

While I disagree on kate's idea that we should pay attention to the angry folks of this nation, I do think she's spot on in her differentiation between Beck and Palin. Beck's an entertainer, a shrewd and calculating man who intends to cash in on whatever part of the population he can get with the least amount of work. 6 years ago, that was insulting liberals and lauding the war against brown people. Now, it's insulting liberals, attacking the super expensive war, and subtly dancing around ideas of revolution and racism. He's a slightly-better-looking Limbaugh, who is similarly a shrewd entertainer.

Palin, on the other hand, is another bag. I'm willing to wager she's slightly more clever than the general opinion of her. Like other people have said, it takes a genius to act that stupid, consistently. She's got a lot of stuff in her that Reagan and Clinton both had. If I were to make a prediction, I'd say she'll be a powerful but ultimately defeated force in the next decade. Between nascent sexism in this country and that fact that she's dangerously stupid, there's just too much stacked against her for the "we're angry but we don't know why" crowd to overcome.

"It's hard for us to understand, if I can put it that way."

Yeah, that's more or less an accurate summary for Canadians as well. At least the Canadians I know (who are, admittedly, mostly neo-Marxist grad students, indie musicians, and other assorted leftist scum).

Sorry for lumping Palin and Beck together; I know it's crude and reductionist, but we often understand them as part of the same cabal.

It's interesting that you make this comparison. Palin's movement is indeed angry, but is it anything else? Pretty much everything I hear from her and the tea party movement is about what is wrong and what we shouldn't be doing, rather than constructive agreement on how things could be substantively and specifically improved. This actually strikes a lot of parallels as to how Obama's motto's were the rather shallow "Hope" and "Change".

I fail to find the substance in either, and wonder whether I'm alone.

Perhaps. So why does he make the argument by saying that "social justice" is a code word for Nazism and Communism, which are both the same thing? That's not just revisionist, it's dead wrong, and it's intended to equate government action with tyrannical cult-of-personality dictatorships. You *really* think that's a healthy way to make the argument?

I think you've uncovered the kernel of sense in beck's diatribes, but (and I fear we're going to hit a brick wall on this concerning philosophy of the responsibility of government) -- there exists a huge leap between "feeding the poor" and "helping people out of poverty."

And I think you can interpret Jesus' teachings either way. We are talking about the Jewish teacher who mentioned that the poor would always be with us (thereby giving his disciples permission to dump 1st century Drakkar Noir on his hair). But Jesus also expected good people to love their neighbors as themselves -- which is, to my interpretation, the most downright "communist" statement ever made, and a mandate to bring about the end of human poverty as we know it.

Not how I read it, but (as I said above) I don't discount your interpretation, either. I can see truth on both sides of the block. I happen to think that Jesus teachings were stridently "communist," if we are to apply a modern term to an ancient philosophy, Jesus did advocate paying taxes, after all.

I want to agree, but my dim view of early religious settlements in America stop me. I don't see them moving here for religious freedom -- I see them moving here for the freedom to impose their religion on others, and they just happened to not have the same mandate as the state.

A lot of people are listening to them, but I wonder how many are taking them seriously. I thought it was telling that Palin tried to do stand-up on Leno: to me, Beck and Palin are trying to be like Jon Stewart and Bill Mahr (well, versions of them that don't even try to be unbiased or accurate) only they're not funny enough to be comedians. Instead, like KaterinLHC said, they are appealing to a sense of rage that is out there.

I just wonder if their efforts to profit off of entertaining that sense of rage is going to translate to any sort of political action. Either for the people listening to them, or for them themselves. Personally, I think both of them are making way too much money to ever think about getting into politics in their future: as long as they are unelected, they can criticize without having to actually do anything. And I wonder--well, hope--that the people listening to them are just venting a sense of rage and will behave rationally when they vote.

I certainly think it could be worded more precisely, yes. As to why it's equated...I would say most likely because it was first brought into our lexicon by Father Coughlin, who happily rationalized the actions of Hitler and Mussolini on his radio show that reached something like 30-40 million people. Ever since, the phrase seems to be have been used mostly by the likes of fascists and statists. It's only very recently (last ten years) that it has caught on in the church, although the concept of helping the poor has obviously been around for millenia — again, I think the church sees an ally that really isn't, and that's what Beck is imprecisely pointing out.

Minacrhist, the term--and certainly the concept--seems to go back farther than that:

"Luigi Taparelli was a widely known Catholic polemicist in the heated mid-nineteenth-century era of social revolution in Europe and unification in Italy. Writing regularly in the Civiltà Cattolica for twelve years, he had the added celebrity of being the Jesuit brother of one of the leading nationalists and liberal prime ministers of Piedmont, Massimo D’Azeglio. Even though Taparelli has been credited with inaugurating a Catholic sociology of politics and with coining the phrase “social justice,” not even the recommendation of Pius XI in the 1930s that students should take up his works, right after those of Saint Thomas Aquinas himself, could stimulate more than sporadic interest—and that, predominantly from subsequent Jesuits associated with the journal Civiltà Cattolica, cofounded by Taparelli in 1850.
http://www.acton.org/publications/mandm/mandm_article_62.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_social_teaching

I wouldn't say Beck is only guilty of imprecision: I'd say he's trying to retcon a century of history the same way the word 'welfare' was by Reagan when he coined the term 'welfare queen'.