via hufington: Glenn Beck's Political, Hypocritical, Me-Party, Tea Party Weekend

What are we to make of Glenn Beck's repeated assertions that his "Restoring Honor" weekend had "nothing to do with politics and everything to do with God?" They are simply additional evidence that Beck is a shrewd marketer with an increasingly messianic view of his political role. The Right-wing Obama-and-Pelosi-hating base is already energized; Beck's soft-focus rally was a public relations effort to expand his reach to the middle. Join us, he's saying, we're the ones who love our country and what it stands for.

Beck's weekend events, and the Tea Party festivities that surrounded them, were really designed to advance the primary political project of far-right leaders in America: marrying anti-tax, anti-government economics with socially conservative religion, and wrapping the whole destructive package in a feel-good Christian-nation Americanism -- and all of that in the service of putting Republicans back in power in 2010 and 2012.

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