Peter Duffy: Actually, Glenn Beck Is Not Father Coughlin
[Peter Duffy is an author and journalist in New York.]
You haven’t truly arrived as a right-wing demagogue on the American airwaves until you’ve been compared to Reverend Charles E. Coughlin, the undisputed “Father of Hate Radio,” as one biographer described him. Those pegged as modern-day Coughlins have been, at various points in our recent history, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, Pat Buchanan, Sean Hannity, and Andrew Breitbart (who LA Observed described as “L.A.’s Father Coughlin,” which is a start).
But no one has been accorded the honor more these days than Glenn Beck, who devoted a segment on his Fox television show back in March to debunking what he called the “laughable” Coughlin comparison made “over and over again” against him by “the Left.” In the wake of Beck’s triumphantly anodyne palooza on the Mall in Washington D.C., the charge has been made with even greater frequency. Keith Olbermann started calling him “Father Cough-Glenn.” Bloomberg’s Al Hunt wrote a column comparing the two “mesmerizing broadcasters able to articulate the anger and frustration of a flock frightened by economic hard times.” And, in his new book about Beck—Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America—Dana Milbank devotes a chapter to placing the two men’sstatements side by side, showing that both railed against government tyranny (our own and others), floated crackpot theories, celebrated the founders and their works, warned of the predations of Europe and international bureaucrats, and heaped praise on an awesome deity. With Beck’s recent Coughlinlike indictment of George Soros as an unrepentant accomplice in the deaths of other Jews and a “puppet master” able to topple governments at will, it’s a surprise more commentators haven’t drawn the comparison.
But Beck is no Coughlin. Beck’s comments and work certainly aren’t defensible. But the comparison to Coughlin is not only flawed—it is historically illiterate, denying Coughlin, pastor of the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan, his rightful place as one of the most odious characters in American history....
Read entire article at The New Republic
You haven’t truly arrived as a right-wing demagogue on the American airwaves until you’ve been compared to Reverend Charles E. Coughlin, the undisputed “Father of Hate Radio,” as one biographer described him. Those pegged as modern-day Coughlins have been, at various points in our recent history, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, Pat Buchanan, Sean Hannity, and Andrew Breitbart (who LA Observed described as “L.A.’s Father Coughlin,” which is a start).
But no one has been accorded the honor more these days than Glenn Beck, who devoted a segment on his Fox television show back in March to debunking what he called the “laughable” Coughlin comparison made “over and over again” against him by “the Left.” In the wake of Beck’s triumphantly anodyne palooza on the Mall in Washington D.C., the charge has been made with even greater frequency. Keith Olbermann started calling him “Father Cough-Glenn.” Bloomberg’s Al Hunt wrote a column comparing the two “mesmerizing broadcasters able to articulate the anger and frustration of a flock frightened by economic hard times.” And, in his new book about Beck—Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America—Dana Milbank devotes a chapter to placing the two men’sstatements side by side, showing that both railed against government tyranny (our own and others), floated crackpot theories, celebrated the founders and their works, warned of the predations of Europe and international bureaucrats, and heaped praise on an awesome deity. With Beck’s recent Coughlinlike indictment of George Soros as an unrepentant accomplice in the deaths of other Jews and a “puppet master” able to topple governments at will, it’s a surprise more commentators haven’t drawn the comparison.
But Beck is no Coughlin. Beck’s comments and work certainly aren’t defensible. But the comparison to Coughlin is not only flawed—it is historically illiterate, denying Coughlin, pastor of the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan, his rightful place as one of the most odious characters in American history....