Today's Daily Schadenfreude: Glenn Beck

Following the summer/bar exam hiatus, today Blast Off! brings back its popular barely tolerable series, the "Daily Schadenfreude," with a regular honoree: ladies and gentlemen, give it up for the most execrable person on television, a cretin among cretins, the one and only Glenn Beck!

Poor Glenn is finding that advertisers aren't taking to his customary lies and hate very well anymore.

GMAC Financial Services has "ceased advertising on the Glenn Beck program"

That's the word this morning from spokesperson Sue Mallino, who confirmed to Media Matters that the company recently pulled its ads off the Fox News program. Mallino would not comment on whether the move was made in response to Beck's claim that President Obama is a "racist," an allegation that sparked a grassroots campaign by ColorofChange.org to get advertisers to stop supporting Beck's program.

Mallino said only that the company has final say over which programs are "not appropriate" to advertise on, and that GMAC Financial Services will continue to advertise on Fox News. But she reiterated the company "has ceased advertising on the Glenn Beck program."

GMAC Financial Services joins a growing list of advertisers who have recently abandoned Beck's television show, including ConAgra, Roche, Sanofi-Aventis, RadioShack, Men’s Wearhouse, State Farm Sargento, LexisNexis-owned Lawyers.com, Procter & Gamble, and Progressive Insurance.

Yes, as noted, GMAC will continue to advertise on Fox News generally, as will, undoubtedly, many of the other advertisers who have ditched Beck. So they'll still be supporting the lies and distortions of the rest of the so-called news network.

However, this is definitely a step in the right direction. In the media, money talks, and seeing this mass exodus from Glenn Beck, whether directly because of his lies or because no one wants to be associated with such an odious person, is both refreshing and long overdue. And the more that the remaining advertisers see their own bottom lines affected through boycotts and other such actions against them in response to their support of this pustulant purveyor of propaganda, the more likely that Fox will see that continuing to employ Glenn Beck is damaging to their bottom line. And while they surely want to spread his message of filth and foulness, further defections by advertisers could mean they simply can't afford to do so anymore.

So, Glenn, you despicable pile of excrement, enjoy the desertions, because no one deserves to be shunned more than you. In the meantime, perhaps you can salve your wounded pride with this meager award, because today's Blast Off! Daily Schadenfreude is for you!

UPDATE (8:30 pm 8/18/09): Eight, count 'em, eight more advertisers pulled their ads from Beck's show today, deciding that they, too, couldn't countenance his disgusting racism and hatred. And one of them is, believe it or not, Wal-Mart.

Dude, if you're a wingnut and you've lost Wal-Mart, well, you might as well just give up.

What this guy said

Not my words. I wish they were. But Charles Pierce of Newton, Mass., sums up how I feel quite well (emphasis mine).

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For the past couple of weeks, they've just gotten blatant about it. The administration of George W. Bush is bound by no law, bound by no precedent, bound not even by the forms of democratic self-government, let alone its actual substance, which is being used as a throw-rug in John Yoo's den these days. They will torture and the Congress can do nothing. Their powers to spy, to search, and to seize are unlimited and Congress is not remotely entitled to know even what those powers are. They can imprison without trial. They can force corporations -- and, indeed, individuals within the government -- to violate the law. They are not subject to treaties. They are not subject to oversight, nor even subpoenas. Read this swill from yesterday. Through his actions, and from the mouths of his minions, George Bush is now claiming fully the powers of a tyrant, by any reasonable definition of the term.

This is the only issue in the presidential campaign. It is the only truly existential threat to the country. Everything else -- health care, climate change, campaign finance, the deficit -- mean nothing if we fail on this fundamental issue. I don't know where the two Democratic contenders fall on this stuff -- their campaigns have been damnably vague about it -- but I know John McCain will be immeasurably worse. His anti-torture bill allowed torture. His "compromise" on judicial nominations allowed the Democrats to maintain the right to filibuster as long as they promised never to do so. This allowed Roberts and Alito to skunk through in order to deface the constitutional order, likely for the rest of my lifetime, and McCain has promised to let a theocratic loon like Sam Brownback to help him pick his own judges. He's always had a sweet tooth for executive power; his line-item veto was so nakedly unconstitutional that even William Rehnquist noticed. And, yesterday, he got up in front of the CPAC crowd that earlier had cheered every single one of the steps toward tyranny that the administration had undertaken. A while back, MoveOn.org said unkind things about a soldier in a newspaper ad, and the entire capital got the vapors. The Congress of the United States was moved to resolve to condemn the newspaper ad. Democratic politicians rushed to sign on. Now, a group of very obvious extremists -- Dick Cheney is an authoritarian bully and a personal coward. His approval rating is 19 percent in the country and 100 percent in that hall. Res ipse loquitur. -- gathers in Washington, and not only do the party's most prominent political figures truckle and beg, your liberal media puts the worst of them on the air, as if they were serious people and not simple public vandals. Jesus Christ in Air Jordans, what in hell was David Bossie, a thug and a hoodlum, doing on Jim Lehrer's program last night? Tom DeLay is under indictment, for pity's sake. Why was he on MSNBC, grinning at Chris Matthews and lying about climate change? Mitt Romney's speech was a sprawling landfill of demagogic swill. It was treated as, well, statesmanlike by people who believe that John McCain is not conservative enough. This is plainly nuts, and any respectable conservative would work tirelessly to wring these crackpots out of the movement before the whole mess goes over the cliff again. Somebody should, you know, take out an ad or something.

Media Matters takes up the charge against Fox News' mislabeling of parties

Thanks to Media Matters for America, the Fox News "habit" of "inadvertently" mislabeling parties, noted previously here at Blast Off!, is getting greater play in the blogosphere and beyond.

I'm torn between watching for more examples of this and realizing that I will need medical help if I watch too much FNC.