The Home Court Advantage

No, this is not suddenly a sports column, but sometimes sports metaphors, or analogies, make for easy explanations, and a brevity not otherwise possible.

After having a discussion with someone I know (they would call it an argument, but I simply call it a discussion, because i never raised the level of my voice, and was not attempting debate, nor the fueling of hostility that eventually came my way)  about the news of the day, I have been given reason to watch the Katie Couric piece available on the internet, where she interviews Glenn Beck for 30 minutes.

I have never listened to Beck before, and only know of his exploits through the bits and pieces that come through on reddit. ( he is not well served by them, in case you are unaware ) Since I don’t watch Fox News (All the news, all the doo-dah day!), I have not seen the man there, I had never seen more than a small clip of his speaking.

I never knew how blessed I had been.

Should we fear this man? No, I would say we should fear those who put him in a position to be heard, because, to my way of thinking, he is not someone that makes any statements worth listening to. (no matter your political bent) He seems to be an equal opportunity basher, yet he claims to have no animosity for either side. He is incapable of delivering any reasoning for the ideas he puts forth, instead trying to intimate to the listener that the feelings are (or should be) a ubiquitous response, courtesy of the cosmic consciousness, that others are somehow unwilling, or unable, to put into words. This man certainly does not speak for me; he has much too much difficulty speaking for himself.

This man is what I, should I have to give it a name, would call a snake-oil salesman; the snake oil for sale would be bad ideas, about everything. When Ms. Couric tried to get him to explain his comment that the President is a racist and hates white culture, he tried to be charming, in a very Sarah Palin way, but he does not have the looks of Palin, or speaking capabilities of Obama, to carry it off.

He was unwilling to directly answer many of her questions, giving the audience the idea that he would not have ’sound bites’ used against him. Understood. But when Ms. Couric told him that there was plenty of time available to enable him to complete his thoughts, he would still not comply. It was an interesting ploy, to appear the wounded party, and be unwilling to participate in his further derision, by those who deride him, but to me, it merely seemed either an attempt to be cagey, or an inability to think in his seat, extemporaneously.

So that is my quick assessment of this person. He is unwilling, or unable to expound upon his ideas, other than in the safe confines of the Fox studios,  or he doesn’t  work well without a teleprompter. Either way, he comes off as disingenuous, and someone that no one, who gives any of the problems of the day real consideration, should waste their time on.

And the title? Another thing about the man is he seems to be a great deal like Bill O’Reilly. Both of them are much more docile outside the confines of their home turf. A few months ago, I remember seeing O’Reilly appear on the Kalb Report, on PBS, and thinking to myself “This man is not nearly the asinine bozo he plays on Fox”.  As a matter of fact, when relieved of his familiar surroundings at Fox, and put in front of Mr. Kalb (an old college professor of O’Reilly’s) and a college audience, he was almost likable.

Perhaps, after making completely sure that no living creatures are in the Fox studios, where the news programs come from, they should be bombed to ashes, because there certainly seems to be some bad juju there.

BTW, the entire conversation can be seen here, a site that is a bit less hammered than YouTube (at least when I was trying to see this).

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