Master of Allusion: Glenn Beck Invokes NYT Media Critic David Carr

We’ve written before about Glenn Beck ’s gift for impressions and his love for quoting the greats. Not even Shakespeare is safe from his rodeo clown-esque caricatures!

On Friday evening, Beck was having fun with some mobster movie clips, playing reel of Robert Deniro in the ’80s mafia film The Untouchables, and slapping around a baseball bat while speaking in his Mobsta’ voice. But when he was finished playing Deniro, he invoked the New York Times media critic David Carr.

Beck adopted an image from Carr’s column last weekend about Fox News and the White House, comparing the Obama administration’s recent criticism of the cable network to ‘bringing a knife to a gun fight.’ From David Carr’s “The Battle Between the White House and Fox News“:

The one weapon all administrations can wield is access, and the White House, making it clear that it will use that leverage going forward, informed Fox News not to expect to bump knees with the president until 2010. But Fox News, as many have pointed out, is not in the access business. They are in the agitation business. And the administration, by deploying official resources against a troublesome media organization, seems to have brought a knife to a gunfight.

Beck takes the image and flips it: In his view the White House is holding the gun and Fox News and all their allies across the country are holding the knives:

The lesson from that movie is you gotta take a stand even though you know that in the end you pull out a knife and they pull out a gun. The question we ask ourselves: what is it we truly believe in? who are we? … Are we the guy who sits around the table in fear? He’s one guy, there’s more of us than there is of him. [5:00 ff]

And with that reminder — that the people’s knives are mightier than any tyrant — we’re back to Shakespeare.

Glenn Beck on Friday:

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