DipshitConservatives.com

So much for free speech huh? If someone ripped signs out of a tea baggers hands like this you know Fox would be calling for their heads and Palin would be tweeting so much she’d break her thumbs.

Last night, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer got down to debatin’ with her opponent, Democratic Attorney General Terry Goddard, and Ben Smith has video of Brewer’s opening statement which could charitably be called a “complete and utter disaster.” Brewer’s inability to, you know — introduce herself, thank the debate sponsors, and welcome viewers at home — hit a snag when her train of thought derailed, leaving dead-air gaps that rival any of the ones on the Arizona-Mexico border.

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Today, the Department of Health and Human Services announced the “first round of applicants accepted into the Early Retiree Reinsurance Program,” a $5 billion program established by the new health care law to help employers and states “maintain coverage for early retirees age 55 and older who are not yet eligible for Medicare.” According to the agency, “nearly 2,000 employers, representing large and small businesses, State and local governments, educational institutions, non-profits, and unions” applied and have been accepted into the program and “will begin to receive reimbursements for employee claims this fall.”

Ironically, one of those employers is the oil, chemicals, and manufacturing conglomerate Koch Industries, which as Lee Fang has reported, has also spent millions of dollars opposing reform:

The contradictory practice of opposing the health care law while applying for its funding has been a common practice among states. For instance, at least 19 of the 22 states that are suing the federal government over health care reform have applied for the law’s rate review grants and some — like Utah — are actively working with HHS to ensure that the law meets their needs. Still, Koch’s efforts to cash in from a law they’re so vehemently opposing may be the most stark example thus far.

During his much-ballyhooed “Restoring Honor” rally on Saturday, Glenn Beck told a whopper involving the founding father who was supposedly unable to tell a lie: George Washington.

Speechifying at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, the controversial Fox News host highlighted the legacy of the nation’s first president to drive home his claim that encouraging honesty and integrity was a main aim of the event. Beck even told attendees that “the next George Washington” was “in this crowd. He may be 8 years old, but this is the moment. This is the moment that he dedicates his life, that he sees giants around him. And 25 years from now, he will come not to this stair, but to those stairs. And he can proclaim, ‘I have a new dream.’”

Beck also invoked Washington while describing the inspiring experience of visiting famous tourist destinations around the nation’s capital. “I have been going to Mt. Vernon,” he explained. Holding out his hands for emphasis, he declared with emotion, “I went to the National Archives, and I held the first inaugural address written in his own hand by George Washington.”

It was an eyebrow-raising revelation and certainly an original image: Beck cradling the actual words of the first president. But would the persnickety gatekeepers of the nation’s historical legacy at the National Archives allow some talk show bombthrower to put his mitts on a rare (and fragile) artifact? The answer, it turns out, is no way. Beck was not telling the truth.

Beck did receive a special VIP tour of the archives, arranged by an as-yet unidentified member of Congress. During that tour, he did get a peek inside the “legislative vault,” which isn’t open to ordinary visitors. But Archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper insists that Beck didn’t lay a finger on any precious documents, much less George Washington’s inaugural address. That would be a major violation of policy. “Those kinds of treasures are only handled by specially trained archival staff,” she explains. Cooper acknowledges that someone at the archives did show the document to Beck, but that was the extent of it. Regarding Beck’s claim that he held the document, Cooper says that seeing such documents for the first time can be a very emotional experience. “I’m certain it was a figure of speech,” she says.

Cooper is being charitable. Beck’s whopper gave his speech more heft and rhetorical flourish. It was high patriotic drama. But his fib stands in stark contrast to the point of the rally, which was all about restoring the principles of courage and honor that the nation was founded upon. In fact, one of Beck’s only prescriptions for fixing the country was to “tell the truth.”

Moreover, Beck has a history of chiding others for lying and stretching the truth to bolster his own incendiary rhetoric. In April, for instance, the Rev. Jim Wallis wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post criticizing Beck for suggesting that the term “social justice” was “code” for communism and for encouraging his radio show listeners to flee churches that promote social justice. Beck retorted by quoting the Bible to Wallis: “Thou shalt not lie.” Groups like Media Matters soon found clips from Beck’s show where he said precisely what Wallis had claimed he did.

Yet getting caught in lies hasn’t ever stopped Beck from holding himself up as someone with the honesty of, well, George Washington. He even has his own version of a cherry-tree-chopping tale, which he recounted during a February show in a segment dedicated to the “Lies Politicians Tell.”

He told viewers:

When I was a kid, growing up you could get away with just about anything in my house except for lying. You did not want to lie in my house. I’ll never forget the day my sister decided to play hooky. My dad worked in the bakery all day, so we never saw him in the light of day. My other sister and I were a little surprised when my dad picked us up and the sun was still out. He said, “Where’s your sister? Be careful what you say. Remember, we tell the truth in this family.”

He made us both sit in the backseat. At this point, we knew bad things were about to go down. When we finally found my other sister, dad pulled up next to her: “So, how was school?” He kept asking and asking, letting her dig the hole deeper. I think I got only like three spankings in my life. My sisters never got any—until that day. The belt made an appearance.

Just imagine what Papa Beck would have done if she said she had skipped school to hold the Declaration of Independence.

On 8.28.2010, Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally was held on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The purpose of the rally, which Beck claimed to be “non-political” despite featuring Tea Party-favorite Sarah Palin as a speaker and its being attended entirely by conservatives, was unclear. The participants spoke abstractly about the need to restore “honor” and “pride” to a country that had lost it. When pressed for when our country had lost its honor, most cited the election of Barack Obama.

8.28.2010 also represented the 47th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, and Glenn Beck has been criticized for by civil rights groups for trying to misappropriate the occasion.

Last year, Beck referred to Barack Obama—our country’s first African-American President–as a “racist… who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.” When offered the chance to respond to Beck’s statements, his fans either agreed with him or simply refused to believe that he had ever made them.

While the speaker list was diverse, the overwhelmingly white crowd expressed paranoid and conspiratorial fears of multiculturalism—that atheists or black liberation theologists or radical Muslims or “free-loading” Latinos were going to ruin our country. There was the constant suggestion that white Christians and their way of life are somehow under assault, and that the attendees of this rally were here to put an end to it and return the country to what it used to be.

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This NEW LEFT MEDIA film was produced and edited by Chase Whiteside (interviewer) and Erick Stoll (camera operator) with additional camera work from Kasey Hosp.