Skepticism

Frogs love Skeptics

Remember the whole “don’t believe something just because someone told you it’s true” thing?

Yeah… especially if it means using that “something” to prove your point on live TV.

Oh, Glen Beck, will you ever stop amusing us with your Poe-esque antics?

Hat tip: Josh (aka Tobasco da Gama)

Update: Glen Beck is loved by PeTA but hated by bloggers because bloggers live in their basements. His producer is a master at camera trickery and Glen is a master of slight of hand. Also, he didn’t kill a frog and wants us to know he’s the greatest guy ever on TV and he’s sorry you’re all zombies. That should save you from being forced to endure this 7 minute clip… but you kind of want to anyway… because it’s all trainwrecky and stuff.

PS. I don’t have a basement.

Elyse

Elyse MoFo Anders is the bad ass behind forming the Women Thinking, inc and the superhero who launched the Hug Me! I'm Vaccinated campaign as well as podcaster emeritus, writer, slacktivist extraordinaire, cancer survivor and sometimes runs marathons for charity. You probably think she's awesome so you follow her on twitter.

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49 Comments

  1. “They’ve forced us to think and get involved!”….

    I’m not sure I can make fun of that.

    Was he being Ironic?

    Beck is one of those *pundits* who is so crazy that nothing can be said to make fun them. It’s like is the character played by Stephen Colbert were a real person.

    No words.

    No words.

    Should have sent a poet.

  2. I don’t fucking believe he did that. On every possible level that phrase can be taken. If he did, he’s an even bigger douchebag than I give him credit for. And if he didn’t, then he’s just a lying, sensationalist douche.

  3. And now we come to the point in the contest that you’ve all been waiting for. John Edward it is time to turn over your crown to this year’s winner Glen Beck.

    Here he is,

    The biggest douche of the universe.

    In all the galaxies,

    There’s no bigger douche than you.

    You’ve reached the top,

    The pinnacle of douchedom.

    Good goin’ douche.

    Your dream has come true.

  4. I’m pretty sure your not ALLOWED to murder a defenseless animal on television, in fact if there are live animals on set, there has to be a monitor to ensure that ‘no animals were harmed’ and so forth.

    HUGE fines for non-compliance.

    I’m pretty sure Ass-monkey Beck threw a rubber frog into the water.

  5. Yeah, I’ve noticed that everyone is calling him a frog-killer. I’ve watched the vids several times, and you don’t see anything leave his hand. This is an old magician’s trick. Penn and Teller would have done it much better.

  6. OK, so…
    1) Live frogs notice when the water gets hot, no matter how slowly you raise the temperature.
    2) Rubber frogs don’t jump out of boiling water.

    I’m having difficulty with the metaphor. Are Republicans the live frogs or the rubber frogs? What about Democrats? Are they frogs or some other amphibian? Were any frogs hurt in the demonstration? If they were, do they have decent health insurance?

  7. @infinitemonkey:

    That’s why I call him “Poe-esque”… I honestly think that he might be satire… but I honestly can’t tell. Is it all performance art? It could be.

    Or does he honestly get hired by big name cable news corporations without having the tiniest ounce of journalistic integrity, might possibly be bi-polar and has no team to fact check for him?

  8. Some comments on the Youtube vids suggest that it was a fake frog. Some say that he made the comment afterwords that it was a fake frog.

    And even if it was a stunt, what the hell was his point?

    Of course, very few of us actually watch this jackass, because we don’t intentionally pollute our minds with this kind of crap unless something like this comes up, so we’ll have to go digging to see if he actually made that claim, and if so, whether it really was a fake frog, or if he was just covering his ass. And that assumes he threw anything into the pot in the first place.

    Even still, even if we are operating under the assumption that it was a fake frog, and we were overreacting to some kind of shock-value stunt, it shows a distinct difference between us and them.

    We make a mistake, we look for more information, admit our mistake, and move on.

    They make a mistake, they repeat the mistake ad nauseum, ignore any evidence to the contrary, and make genuine asses of themselves.

  9. I have no sound for videos while at work.
    …but…
    I doubt he threw a real live frog in there… seems like asking for animal righs hoopla….

    Regardless, Glen Beck is am Ingrown Hair of the Ass.

  10. @Elyse: First of all, I think journalistic integrety is as hard to find as an 18 year old virgin in Las Vegas. Additionally, when your a “commentator” it seems like you can get away with telling half-truths even more, and that’s on both sides. So, I’ve given up watching commentators who report. The whole lot of them need to just go and sit on their comments.

  11. Have you actually seen the video? The whole metaphor he was talking about relies on the frog jumping back out – like his audience being thrown into Barack’s “hot water”. Why would he not throw a frog in there and automatically make his whole spiel moot?

    Unless he is a brilliant satirist, of course. But if you believe Beck is for real, then the frog was, too, or it would make absolutely no sense at all.

  12. @infinitemonkey:

    But he doesn’t even have someone to tell him a misspelled OLIGARCHY.

    He might be exactly what he appears to be… or he might be a calculated morning-zoo sensationalist doing something kind of newsy-related. Or both… I don’t know. I can’t tell.

    But back to the kinda crazy, bi-polar thing… the whole video is here:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wXu35GwVL8

    he says the frog is fake… I assume it is… but still… the fact remains that the frog will probably die if you throw it in boiling water… but it probably will jump out if you slowly increase the temperature.

  13. Real or not, maybe somebody can sic PETA on him and the two different kinds of crazy will annihilate each other.

  14. I love Glenn Beck! Funnier than the Colbert Report by miles.

    Have you seen the one were he starts crying? I could hardly breath I was laughing so much. So much it actually hurt.

  15. To be fair, this attempt at a metaphor is at least more coherent than the time he pretended to pour gasoline on one of his interns so he could light him on fire.

  16. Glenn Beck may be many things but “frog killer” isn’t one of them. He palmed the little critter. Badly.

    As for the metaphor, he needs to work on those. It’s just too much drama. Does he remind anybody else of a used car salesman?

  17. @FledgelingSkeptic: If he palmed the frog, the next thing he would have done is throw it on the floor, point to it and say, “See, it jumped out!” He wouldn’t look in horror, step away and say, “Forget the frog.” Loose cannons don’t think far enough ahead to pull off stunts like this.

  18. @Elyse: You mean there’s more than one?

    As for wine, I recomend madamé try a dry white wine with her le grenouille a Blanc Alsace or a dry german like a Riesling

  19. @Peregrine & @Old Geezer: Exactly why I have a problem with the “fake frog” thing. If he did use a fake frog, it completely invalidates his reason for setting up the whole ridiculous stunt in the first place, which was supposedly to demonstrate that the frog will jump out of the boiling water.

    Then again, here I am assuming Glenn Beck will behave in a rational manner, so maybe the joke’s on me after all.

    @FledgelingSkeptic: Abso-fucking-lutely. My coworker watched it and pointed out that it had to be fake because of Beck’s “shit-eating grin”. I had to point out that he has that same expression all the time. Even during his supposedly heartfelt “9/12 Project” announcements. What a fucking phony.

    And yet people take him seriously.

  20. After watching one more time, I spotted a couple things. First, just as he closes his hand around the frog, it jumps out of his grasp but he acts like he caught it anyway.

    Then when he gestures as he throws the frog in the pot, nothing leaves his hand. You would presume to be able to see a small, dark mass arc from his hand to the pot but there is nothing.

    Bad slight of hand.

    @Joshua Beck is all just smoke and mirrors using bad rhetoric to make a hackneyed point. This is just more evidence that he’s a joke.

  21. Well, could those of you who think it was a fake frog or that Beck palmed it explain to me what the point of this was, then? Why would he set up something where a frog jumping out of hot water is what he wants to happen and then prevent that thing from happening, only to stare dumbly at the pot and say, “well, forget the frog”?

    Why? What’s the point?

  22. @Berandor:

    The next thing he said was “Forget the Conservatives, because most of them are fake. Forget the liberals, because most of them are fake. Forget the frog because it’s fake”

    and then some Glen Beckish nonsense…

    The point is that he’s kind of a douche, and I think he wanted everyone to know that.

    Also, he got to call bloggers basement people.

  23. I hate to admit it, but I have to agree with Beck on one point. I feel dirty just saying that, but it has to be said.

    He’s not a Poe.

    A true Poe; a true honest parody, has a certain honesty about it. It might have you fooled for a few seconds, or a few minutes, maybe even a few months on the outside, but they tend to drop subtle hints, intentionally or otherwise.

    Like the guy who wanted to ban divorce in California a couple weeks ago. That was an honest Poe. He had me fooled for about the first 2 paragraphs.

    And I’ve often heard the Fred Phelps is a Poe too. Just tonight, someone on Twitter called it “performance art”. Really? How could an honest, decent person preach hatred and deceit, affecting, the lives of millions, condoning violence, when he doesn’t really believe it himself, and stand to look at himself in the mirror? He either really believes what he’s preaching, or he’s deliberately doing it for profit. Either way, he’s a dishonest, despicable excuse for a human being who has caused real harm and suffering to people.

    I could imagine doing a Poe myself, but I don’t think I could stay in character long enough. For one thing, I don’t imagine I could live with myself if I managed to sink to Glen Beck’s level without truly believing it.

    No, if a true Poe can pull off the illusion for that long, misrepresent themselves, and living with themselves, and influencing so many people into pulling off this level of inanity, and never let on that they’re acting, then they’re so dishonest and reprehensible that they might as well be real.

    Glen Beck is not a Poe. He’s a lying, manipulative, opportunistic, conservative douche bag, representing the absolute worst of conservative ideology who’s played no small part in stirring up the closeted bigotry of the nation thereby undermining any chance of mutual progress. But he’s not a Poe.

  24. If Glenn Beck starts killing animals live on his show, I might just start watching, at a certain point crazy become entertaining. But on a serious point, if anyone watched his show before he was on FOX, he seemed pretty normal then, I miss that Glenn, I don’t know who this Glenn is

  25. Just to get this right, I looked up the whole video. It seems, during an interview with Katie Couric, he said McCain would have been worse for the country than Obama and the fact that he said this made people question whether he was for real or not. The frog thing was his explanation of the comment. The frog is America, McCain would have been the water getting slowly hotter, and Obama is the boiling water.

    The boiling water is preferable because now Americans will hopefully wake up and hold his (libertarian?) views. That’s the metaphor. What does the frog not jumping out mean to the metaphor? Probably nothing except that they can’t get a rubber frog to jump out of water.

    It annoys me when people are taken out of context, even idiots like Beck. The original video edited his long rant before the frog thing and cuts out right before he says the frog was fake. It’s not helpful to attack him for something silly like boiling a fake frog.

  26. No one has mentioned the added layer of confusion yet:

    The last half of his “explanation” is refuting the claims that he’s “fake.” He says if he’s not saying things he truly believes, then he must be the greatest actor on TV and therefore deserves an Emmy.

    This is right after he goes on at length proving he didn’t actually kill a frog — in effect, saying he was ACTING during that segment (acting like he catches a frog, acting like he throws it in the water, acting surprised it doesn’t jump out).

    So, he proves he’s an actor, and then says it’s insane for others to accuse him of acting. That makes sense.

  27. I’m going to let out my rabid animal welfare activist for a moment and say that I don’t care whether he actually threw a fake frog or not. There was absolutely no reason to stage that mock-kill. It didn’t support his point (in fact, it seems to have contradicted it), it didn’t seem to serve any kind of artistic purpose, etc. It looks like he just killed/mock-killed an animal for the hell of it.

    That’s just not cool.

  28. I saw the frog jump outta his hand before he closed it and removed it from the container.
    This guy has lost his fucking mind and is dragging all the weak non-thinkers down with him. The problem with that is, thier vote counts the same as the vote of rational, intelligent people.
    This sucks.

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