Glenn Beck (Tea Party darling, ex-FoxNews media pundit and now CEO and star of his own online broadcasting network gbtv) has a shiny new toy. He has had a 20 year old movie set of the Oval Office refurbished so that he can use it for a weekly broadcast about “the things we wish the President would say to the American people – or the things he should say”, which his team promised “will be primarily Reaganesque in tone”.

Now Beck’s delivered his first address, complete with inspirational soundtrack:

My fellow Americans, today we are going to try something new.

I am going to sit here and say what we all know is true… but which everyone is afraid to say.

I am going to talk about what made this country is great… but why it is risking its greatness.

This is what our leaders should be doing. This is what our leaders are paid to do. This is why we give them advisers… and airplanes to travel the world… and beautiful offices, just like this one.

But they don’t do it. They won’t do it.

So I will.

The video page at YouTube has a fuller transcript, although it seems to me that a couple of the snarkier asides (“we keep on being told [federal employees] are the best of the best, right?”) have not been transcribed.

I bet Colbert is spitting chips that he didn’t think of doing this first, but then if this was being done on a satirical TV show, it would be derided as grotesquely unbelievable.

Categories: culture wars, ethics & philosophy, media, parties and factions

Tags: WTF were they thinking?