He faulted Douthat, a conservative columnist for the New York Times, for lending credibility to the Tea Party movement and distancing it from the John Birch Society. It’s quite the opposite, writes Hitchens—if not worse. He criticizes Beck for “inciting [his followers] to read the work of W. Cleon Skousen, a man more insane and nasty than [Birch Society founder Robert] Welch and a figure so extreme that ultimately even the Birch-supporting leadership of the Mormon Church had to distance itself from him.”

He goes on to say,

So, Beck’s “9/12 Project” is canalizing old racist and clerical toxic-waste material that a healthy society had mostly flushed out of its system more than a generation ago, and injecting it right back in again. Things that had hidden under stones are being dug up and re-released. And why? So as to teach us anew about the dangers of “spending and deficits”? It’s enough to make a cat laugh. No, a whole new audience has been created, including many impressionable young people, for ideas that are viciously anti-democratic and ahistorical. The full effect of this will be felt farther down the road, where we will need it even less.

But if your cat still isn’t laughing, there’s plenty more where that came from. You can read about all the things that make Christopher Hitchens “curl [his] lip” over at Vanity Fair.

Lawrence O’Donnell showed a preview for the doc on The Rachel Maddow Show last night (video below), and actually what it reminds me most of is the 9/12 promo Glenn Beck used to show on his program last August. “It began as a ripple, an online whisper…” And no, this is not a spoof, though the fact one of the stars in the film is dressed in period revolutionary clothing makes that somewhat less easy to spot. Also, Dick Armey is apparently helping promote this. Trailer below, Rachel Maddow clip below that.

“If I didn’t know any better I’d think they just put two days together and acted like they didn’t,” said host Jon Stewart, before going on to present video evidence that that was precisely what they did — including Hannity exclaiming over how many people cared enough about freedom to come down to be heard on a Thursday. Er, Saturday. When is the Superbowl again?

It’s really blatant and remarkable and thank God they were watching, because this sort of misrepresentation is simply not an accident. And, to the point made by the White House about Fox not being a news organization — well, a news organization does not sub footage of a bigger, better attended rally in for footage of a smaller, less attended rally in order to make the latter rally look bigger. That falls under the category of “producer whipping up the crowd for the camera” and for which that producer was “disciplined” for the “mistake” and about which an internal Fox standards email was subsequently sent. As our colleague Zeke Turner put it back then: “When somebody comes to you, as a journalist, for information and allows you to control their field of vision, it’s expected that you’ll turn your lens on the truth. Not an augmented or altered version of the truth.”

This is an augmented and altered version of the truth. One wonders if the rebuke from Fox to the other networks for not adequately covering this huge and momentous occasion would have been next. Watch this footage.

> Update: FNC tells us Hannity will address this on his show tonight. -SK

Related:
Grass Roots or Astro-Turf? Video Shows Fox News Producer Rallying 9/12 Protesters
Internal Fox News Email Addresses “Standards” After 9/12 Flap
“How Did ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC and CNN Miss This Story?”

Armey, who left Congress in 2003, hasn’t let the lack of elected official status keep him from influencing government. He, and the group FreedomWorks which he chairs, were key players in pulling together what was popularly known as the 9/12 protests that took place this past September in D.C. The Times it should be noted does not bother to refer to them as such, opting only to describe them as “a big march on Washington.” More on the power of a name shortly.

Armey has also “been traveling the country in support of favored political candidates, not all of them running on the Republican line.” Including the now infamous NY-23, and we all saw how that worked out (though some would argue NY-23 was just a sign of what’s to come for a leaderless G.O.P). Alas this article went to press before those results came in so no word on where Armey felt his involvement may have gone amiss. In short, Army appears to be what Sarah Palin hoped to be when she resigned as Governor of Alaska: an unelected official serving the so-called civic needs of her country.

Speaking of Sarah Palin and the power of words. Armey apparently feels that imaginary death panels are equally as useful as the real ones, which Palin so famously claimed were part of President Obama’s health care bill.

Armey prides himself on his intellect and rationality, but his years in Washington have taught him the political uses of irrationality and even outright fantasy. He told me he does not believe some of the most extreme charges that emerged in the debate over health care reform — for example, that “death panels” will tell elderly people when it’s time to die — but he welcomes the energy and passion that such beliefs bring to his side. “You know that expression: The enemy of my enemy is my friend?” he asked. “Are their fears exaggerated? Yeah, probably. But are Obama’s promises exaggerated? I may think it’s silly, but if people want to believe that,” he said, referring to death panels, “it’s O.K. with me.”

Which makes for a great soundbite, yes. But distilled down also hints strongly at what the political landscape in the next few years is likely to look like: the continuing evolution of “political uses of irrationality and even outright fantasy’ in an effort to gain political power.

It’s because this race is a referendum on town halls, on tea partying, on the 9/12 Project.

Last night Hannity had on Hoffman to attempt to seal the victory, with a lengthy interview at the top of his show. But it wasn’t just Hoffman – the candidate (who has never run for political office and has said he never planned to) sat quietly while he was flanked by Fred Thompson and Jeri Thompson, who sounded quite politically polished herself. In fact, for the majority of the interview, Hoffman sat quietly, hands folded in his lap, periodically saying things like, “We’ve got to fight!” while Hannity and the Thompson’s took the lead.

“I wasn’t paying attention to it as closely as you were,” said Hannity to Jeri. “Then I started reading your emails and I started wrapping my arms around it, and it wasn’t just me by the way there were other conservatives Mark Levin is another one, and we spoke at length about it.”

Earlier in the evening, Hannity’s lead partner in the election of Hoffman, Glenn Beck, spent nearly 10 minutes hammering home just how very important this run-off race was. “I really don’t care about local politics all that much,” he said, which is pretty much what the Watertown Daily Times found out about Hoffman himself, who doesn’t even live in the district. “I really don’t follow this, I mean I do a national show, but I am watching this one, but not because Doug Hoffman is all that electric…” (and Glenn Beck knows electric) “…I don’t know much about him but from what I do know I seem to like, but who knows.”

Then he played a clip of his interview with Hoffman on his radio show earlier that day. But he didn’t play the part that’s getting all that attention.

>>> NEXT PAGE: Take a guess who Hoffman calls a “mentor”…and why it’s not just Beck/Hannity (and video/audio)

Related:
Equality Marchers to Obama: Enough Already! [Mediaite]
SLIDESHOW: Scenes From The Equality March [Mediaite]

Though I’d never participated in a march before, I can say with reasonable confidence that this was probably the most colorful gathering of people to ever join together for the same cause (except for, say, Hallowe’en in the West Village). Rainbow flags, Mardi Gras beads, and glittery purple signs were ubiquitous; an audience with Lady Gaga lay ahead. Rather than the somber and festering mob I had expected, the crowd was really…happy!

“Somebody in their speech stated that there were upwards of 1100 ways in which the LGBT community is discriminated against. This is obviously 1100 too many. “

By contrast, friends who had attended the 9/12 Tea Party march last month said they had found the vibe negative, saying the gathering was fragmented — so many people marching for different reasons — but all against something, be it public healthcare or corporate bailouts. There was a lot of Obama-hate going on, which was definitely not the case here. Many were sporting tee shirts and pins with the Prez on them (and not the sort of Obama-is-a-Socialist gear from the Tea Party!) There was lots of hugging and picture taking and the message in the air was: “It’s Time.” Ironically, right as the march began, a very real and very vivid rainbow appeared in the sky. This was clearly a sign of support from God.

It had been a while coming, but we’d take it.

We had been receiving updates all morning via text from the march’s organizer, David Mixner, who’d warned us of the presence of conservative protesters. His message was to stay strong and focused on the cause. I didn’t know what to expect…a horde of screaming right winged midwesterners who would throw fruit at us? Christian organizations promising us an eternity in hell? Not so much. Instead, there were approximately six or seven middle-aged stragglers with cheap signs who meekly yelled “Sinners” as we marched past. My favorite was a very old little man with a megaphone who was berating us as though it was his last mission on earth, and at approximately eighty-five, it very well may have been!

SLIDESHOW: SCENES FROM THE EQUALITY MARCH

Two and a half hours later, we finally made it to the lawn of the Capitol where we were invited to join in singing the Gay National Anthem — which I had wagered would be “YMCA” but that was, of course, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Next up came all of the speeches, which were all really powerful. Obama and Congress definitely have some work to do, and the message being heralded was loud and clear: DOMA and DADT need to be ended now. Acceptance is not equality.

Actress Cynthia Nixon‘s speech smartly broke down the psychology of the effects DOMA and DADT have on society: that they create a divide between people, separating us into “whole people” and “inferior people” categories, which in turn, of course, creates discrimination and hatred. Tanner Effinger, a former Marymount Manhattan College (or, as we called it: Fairymount) classmate of mine, thanked the crowd over and over and over again. I don’t think anyone realized just how solid attendance would be. People came from all fifty states, and were of all generations. There was great emphasis on this being a fight of the youth…which became abundantly obvious when Lady Gaga emerged to give her speech.

You’ve never heard cheering until you’ve heard the gays go gaga for Gaga. She called out to Obama, screaming “Are you listening? ARE YOU LISTENING?!” (He had given her a shout-out the night before, so hopefully he was.) She also said that this was “The single most important moment of my career.” A huge statement from such an über-celebrity who has millions of fans, both gay and straight.

Somebody in their speech stated that there were upwards of 1100 ways in which the LGBT community is discriminated against. This is obviously 1100 too many. The message is loudly, embarrassingly clear: Enough is enough! It’s completely humiliating and horrifyingly sad to live in a country whose leaders can pick and choose who gets rights and who doesn’t. And it’s not just about a separation of church and state, because there were plenty of people there to defy that tired idea. Good Lord! There were marchers who were gay Mormons. There were priests. There were ten-year-olds and there were ninety-year-olds. There were pregnant women. There were gays — and plenty of straights. There was every color person from every possible place.

There were thousands of us there, and thousands more who couldn’t make it but who agreed with our agenda. There is a whole new generation who wants reform, and it’s definitely coming, but it needs to happen NOW.

Obama, we love you. We voted for you. But we are tired of waiting.

Jesse Barton is a 25-year-old Manhattanite who has contributed work to SheKnows.com, Guest of a Guest, and worked as a beauty copywriter for the Santa Monica-based company Bennett Kreative. She has also worked as an actress and model and made appearances on several TV shows, including “One Life to Live.” She loves nothing more than lounging about eating Indian food in her new apartment in Curry Hill. Find her on Twitter here.

Media Matters was the first to post the video on Friday evening, followed by DailyKos, and now the Huffington Post has posted a more extensive view of the scene and confirmed the name of the producer.

“The employee is a young, relatively inexperienced associate producer who realizes she made a mistake and has been disciplined,” FNC Washington Bureau Chief Bryan Boughton told HuffPo.

At first glance, Noonan’s ‘pump up the volume’ gestures to the crowd seem innocuous. But when you consider FNC’s whole “Fair and Balanced” credo, the interaction between producer and crowd is completely out of bounds. It’s the same problem that newspapers face when they are caught altering photographs to seem more brilliant in print: when somebody comes to you, as a journalist, for information and allows you to control their field of vision, it’s expected that you’ll turn your lens on the truth. Not an augmented or altered version of the truth.

And, given that Fox expressed disgust that other networks weren’t devoting more coverage to an event of such magnitude, one wonders why at least one Fox producer thought the scene needed help getting ready for the camera.

See the video for yourself here (from Media Matters):

The scene as it appeared on Fox News:

The piece, entitled “Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck’s life,” takes writer Alexander Zaitchi inside the latest conservative uprising — dubbed the 9/12 movement — which marched on Washington, D.C. last weekend under Beck’s leadership and guidance. Beck’s ire directed at the government appears to stem from the teachings of Skousen, a “once-famous anti-communist ‘historian’” who was “too extreme” even for his early ’80s conservative contemporaries. To Beck’s followers, Skousen is no stranger:

Anyone who has followed Beck will recognize the book’s title. Beck has been furiously promoting “The 5,000 Year Leap” for the past year, a push that peaked in March when … a new edition of “The 5,000 Year Leap,” complete with a laudatory new foreword by none other than Glenn Beck, came out of nowhere to hit No. 1 on Amazon. It remained in the top 15 all summer, holding the No. 1 spot in the government category for months. At one 912 meet-up I attended in Florida, copies were stacked high on a table against the back wall, available for the 912 nice price of $15. “Don’t bother trying to get it at the library,” one 912er told me. “The wait list is 40 deep.”

The entire Salon article is well worth a read, but for those without the time or patience for the whole 4,000+ piece, we’ve run down a few of the most revealing, juicy bits below. Notice any similarities with Beck? Sound off in the comments.

• Skousen’s The 5,000 Year Leap interprets American history “through an unspoken lens of Mormon theology” and is required reading at religious schools such as George Wythe University in Utah.
• The FBI kept a 2,000 page report on Skousen.
• The rest of Skousen’s oeuvre includes pamphlets and books on “the Red Menace, New World Order conspiracy, Christian child rearing, and Mormon end-times prophecy.”
• Per the FBI file: “During the past year or so, Skousen has affiliated himself with the extreme right-wing ‘professional communists’ who are promoting their own anticommunism for obvious financial purposes.”
• Critics charged Beck Skousen with “inventing fantastic ideas and making inferences that go far beyond the bounds of honest commentary.”
• Applying Skousen’s attacks on communism to today, Beck has listed the new enemy as “liberals, special-interest groups, [and] the ACLU,” according to his first book The Real Truth.
• “Over my book or anything else, get The 5,000 Year Leap,” said Beck. “It is the principle.”
• Another book being passed around at 9/12 “seminars” is Skousen’s Making of America, which describes “America’s religious Founders and their happy slaves.”

What is it that they say about the stakes of understanding and repeating history? It’s something about being doomed.

Sensing that perhaps that number was a little high, he traced the error back to a conservative Twitterer named @pinkelephantpun, who claimed to have gotten the figure from ABC News. (Which, faster than Joe Wilson can amend an apology, ABC News denied.) In fact, ABC estimated the crowd, on the high end, at about 70,000.

That’s a pretty big difference. How big? It’s two orders of magnitude. As King Kaufman notes, it’s like confusing Vermont with Texas. More concretely, it’s akin to confusing the number of pixels in the two images below.

That’s some error!

(N.B. This image, believe it or not, was condensed for size. For actual image showing visible pixels, please see the original post at pbump.net.)

Philip Bump is a technology and communications consultant in New York City who writes “The Wayback Machine,” an occasional column for Mediaite about the intersection of history and the Internet. Follow him on Twitter here.

Where was Beck today? In his New York City Studio – but he wasn’t happy about it.

After all the promotion of this Beck-driven event, on Fox News, on Beck’s personal website and on the 9/12 project website, it was jarring to see the Fox News host conducting his program like any other usual 5pmET weekday show. Here’s how Beck explained it:

Well hello America, I have to tell you I’m not in a very good mood today because I would much rather be, can you show the pictures of Washington, I would much rather be in Washington DC today…I’m not in a good mood because I would rather be there quite honestly, and standing in the crowd with people.

Well if he would rather be standing in the crowd, with the people, why wasn’t he? This project is something he admits to launching himself, and now we’ve reached the much-talked about date. The two-hour special featured a look at various tea party protests around the country, but the focus was D.C. Instead of Beck on the ground, it was FNC reporter and ambusher Griff Jenkins, making sure to ask at every possible opportunity for members of the crowd to talk to Beck. Wouldn’t it have been more effective if Beck were actually there? And further, despite saying he’d “rather” be in D.C. he gives no reason for why he didn’t actually go. FNC tells Mediaite the plan was always for Beck to anchor from the studio.

Beck described the crowd as a “collection of Americans who want both parties to stop with the corruption stop with the spending and start listening to the people.” It’s not a stretch to say Beck is the leader of this group. But by having him stuck in the New York City studio, it comes across like the general who isn’t willing to hit the frontlines with his troops. Instead, he’s the distant coach – calling the plays in the huddle and letting the players run around and attempt to execute the gameplan.

Beck has an enormous platform in Fox News, and an ever-expanding audience. No one can argue that he’s at the top of his game right now. And he certainly has his critics – many with legitimate concerns. But he’s here to stay – or until he self-destructs. His strong ties to the grassroots tea party movement will surely boost his appeal with those disenchanted with the government. But couldn’t he have attended his own party?

On a side note, here was the other reason Beck wasn’t in a good mood:

And then the other thing is I spent it about an hour in traffic, this is how out of control our government is. Here in New York, they had a Labor Day parade today. The week after Labor Day. Nobody stood and watched it. It was labor unions, just walking down the street, and so they closed the traffic here in New York.

With one project down, it’s time for a new project. Here’s Beck explaining his newest feature, finding 56 “re-founders” in D.C. to “help us get the disease out of there”:

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» Follow Steve Krakauer on Twitter

Even now, I am not sure what it had to do with 9/11 — other than completely co-opting it for Tea Partiers, Fox News, dissent and — oh yes — Glenn Beck.

The thesis: Beck wants this country to return to the values it held on 9/12/2001, the day after the terrorists attacks devastated and horrified the nation and the world. As someone who was in New York on 9/11 (and 9/12, and was evacuated from midtown office buildings in a panic along with thousands after a scare on 9/13), I remember those values being terror, bewilderment, shock, horror, and a profound grief. Over the days that followed, as people walked around in a daze and hugged and clasped hands more than usual, I recognized it as a city-wide sense of bereavement.

But Beck is right — there was also something else. There were people all over the city galvanized to try to help. People with medical training rushing to Ground Zero to see if they could offer assistance. Collections and donations for food and supplies. My roommate and I ran around our high-rise in an impromptu clothing drive, and took bags down to Chelsea Piers where volunteers were being organized. Rumbling past us along the West Side Highway were trucks, laden with white ash-covered debris. After seeing that, my roommate put his head down on his knees and just sobbed.

There was also the well-documented coming together of the country, looking to the President and his bullhorn, unable to turn the TV coverage off, donations pouring in to the Red Cross. There was a nation riveted, wanting to do something.

There was not, as I can recall, an angry if vague call to ward off socialism and cut taxes.

Yet that was what dominated today’s 9/12 Glenn Beck special on Fox News. Starting from the position that “Americans” “with their head in the sand” were to blame for 9/11 on 9/10/2001, he somehow moved to the now-familiar rhetoric of the Tea Partiers, about lower taxes and “taking our country back,” with a dash of fist-shaking at nebulous “political corruption” across government. Beck was careful to point out that the corruption was bi-partisan — he wasn’t on a particular side! — but of course happily hosted Republican Senator Jim DeMint and Congressman Mike Pence — two of “the good guys.” (And, of course, the past few weeks have left us with little doubt as to who the bad guys are. So there’s that.)

But as far as I can tell, other than the obvious and craven “hook” for the special, this two-hour special wasn’t about 9/11. I may have missed it, but I didn’t even see reference made to the 9/12 manifesto — its 9 principles and 12 values — that was supposedly the raison d’etre for the project. That may be because, as True/Slant’s Colin Horgan points out, they’ve been removed from the 9/12 website with no explanation.

>>>NEXT: Glenn Beck doesn’t trust “the media” and hates when you throw around the term “racist.” Also: Wet T-shirt contest!

While its too early to gauge the overall attendance and success of this event, it is getting a lot of attention by CNN. However, in its early reports, a viewer would never know that the event was conceived and promoted by the Fox host. Beck put together The 9/12 Project, a campaign named for the “nine principles and twelve values that embody the spirit of the American people on the day after the September 11 attacks.”

Beck has previously supported the tea party protests from their inception, both on his shows and by participating in fundraisers, and has also promoted tea parties organized by FreedomWorks and the American Family Association with whom he’s working with on the 9/12 project.

Before coming to the Fox News Channel, Beck had his own show on CNN’s Headline News. Now that he has effectively created his own news spectacle, he has put CNN in a significant quandary – how does one cover the event and ignore the individual who put it together? See for yourself in the following clip: