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Thursday, September 23

President FLOTUS and Shameless Republicans. Talk about being caught between the devil and the deep blue sea

John Batchelor reports at his blog on rumors about staffing changes in Obama's inner circle of advisors and that Michelle Obama is calling the shots for her disengaged husband. John (a Republican) has not yet blogged on the "Pledge to America," which the GOP announced yesterday, but he's been notoriously brutal in his comments about the party leadership. See his Attack of the Zombie Republicans, Part 4, for his latest diatribe.

I myself am working up to a diatribe after taking in the Pledge to America, which the Christian Science Monitor describes as the GOP's attempt to play to the Tea Partiers.

Everyone with half a brain knows that all the Republicans had to do in the run-up to the mid-term elections was stand back and let the Democrats continue to form a circular firing squad.

It's been going so badly for the Democrats and the Totalitarian wing of the party that they've been reduced to attacking Fox News Cable and trying to portray the Tea Partiers as American Taliban. That's been their answer to criticism. But now, with the unveiling of the Pledge, the GOP leaders have rescued their opponents by giving them something like 20 pages of talking points.

But nobody's that stupid. So what's really going on? I suspect the GOP leadership is trying to force Glenn Beck, who is the most influential person in America at this time, into carrying the Republican Party on his shoulders.

If that's their game, I guess they weren't tuned into Fox on the evening that Glenn pulled the John Galt Maneuver on Rupert Murdoch.

The maneuver, for those who haven't read Atlas Shrugged, was a swift sidestep to reveal to a national television audience that he had been forced in front of the TV camera at gunpoint.

Glenn did as much shortly after his show was launched on Fox. This was after Obama returned the British government's gift of a bust of Winston Churchill and didn't give Gordon Brown a Rose Garden press conference or a state dinner when Brown came to Washington to yap at Congress.

Out of the blue, Glenn turned and called off camera, "How many newspapers does Rupert Murdoch own in Britain?" Answering his own question he said, "All of them."

Then he looked into the camera and said in robotic fashion that he wanted everyone in his audience to write the British embassy (while the address of the embassy in Washington scrolled on the TV screen) to express their anger with Obama's disrespect to the British and to say how much they loved Britain.

It was the first time I'd seen the show and my previous exposure to Beck's views had been 10 minutes of watching his show on CNN many months before. Yet in that one moment I became this country's staunchest Glenn Beck fan. Surely only those in the audience who knew about Murdoch's cynical support for the British Labor party grasped the full import of Glenn's maneuver. But it was his way of telling Murdoch that while he was grateful to have been given a show at Fox he would never be grateful enough to compromise his principles.

I wrote all the above before Glenn's 5:00 PM show aired this evening. At 5:06 PM I can report to you that within the first minute of his show Glenn signaled that he would not carry the GOP and its Pledge to America on his shoulders.

Noting the GOP pledge to return the federal government's spending to pre-2008 levels, Glenn asked, "Pre-08 levels? How about returning it to pre-1908 levels?"

And he was just getting warmed up. I hope the GOP leaders are tuned in and taking notes.

As for me -- I too am grateful to Rupert Murdoch. I'm grateful that he brought Glenn to Fox, and that he made FNC into the only mainstream alterative to the Democrat Party-friendly television networks and cable news shows. But not so grateful I'll ever forget or forgive that Murdoch cynically carried so much water for China's Communist Party that he can be fairly termed this era's Edgar Snow.

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