Donald Hank
Cute gecko becomes obnoxious chameleon
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By Donald Hank
August 25, 2009

WorldNetDaily recently reported that Glenn Beck, one of the boldest and most brilliant talk show hosts on Fox News, has been targeted by a smear campaign headed by an avowed communist now employed by the White House. The goal was to bully Glenn's advertisers into pulling their sponsorship of his show.

It worked. Advertisers like

    — CVS-Caremark

    — Geico

    — Sargento

    — Radio Shack

    — State Farm

and a host of others decided to stop sponsoring the show. One of the reasons given was that Glenn had supposedly suggested poisoning Nancy Pelosi. It was based on a perfectly harmless, hilarious spoof, and was a ridiculous claim, especially in view of the constant inflammatory remarks against conservatives made by leftwing TV hosts also sponsored by some of these companies.

A web site (http://www.defendglenn.com/) was set up to defend Glenn by contacting these companies and telling them that Glenn's viewers will be boycotting their products if they continue to withdraw sponsorship.

Using a link from that site, I wrote as follows to several of these companies:

    I understand that avowed communist bully van Jones made you a deal you couldn't turn down and you caved by pulling your sponsorship of the Glenn Beck show. So much for standing up for freedom.

    Do we just give up now and hand everything over to the communists and go quietly to the gulag?

    I for one have a long memory and will not be patronizing your company. I doubt I'll be alone.

Geico responded, saying, among other things:

    If the inflammatory nature of the comments on a program overshadows our message and causes GEICO to be drawn into a national debate, we are likely to reconsider where we place our marketing messages, which is what we did.

    ....

    As a company, we do not take positions on controversial issues.

I fired back:

    If there were a controversy over whether private insurance should be nationalized and all insurance company CEOs fired and jailed, would you take part in that controversy?

    But let's cut to the chase: By pulling your sponsorship of Glenn Beck, a patriot who opposes a communist takeover of the US, in obedience to an avowed communist bully who wants to silence Beck and the rest of us dissenters, you HAVE taken part in the controversy. Because prior to the demand on the part of the communist bully Van Jones, you didn't see anything wrong with sponsoring the Glenn Beck show so you didn't think that defending freedom in the USA, the last bastion of freedom, was controversial.

    To sum up your viewpoint, you think a patriot like Beck is inflammatory, but as for communists like Van Jones, you will obey them, and will take your business elsewhere because he said he is offended. He intimidated you too, didn't he?

    The system you just caved in to claimed close to 100 MILLION lives in Cuba, Red China, Russia, Cambodia and Vietnam, but not before enough "nice" people there decided to play along with the deadly regimes for personal gain. Without these people — whom Lenin called "useful idiots," the tyrants could not have succeeded.

    If you had opened a history book, you would realize that it is not by giving in, lying down and playing dead that this high-stakes game of freedom vs slavery is won. It is lost that way.

    Very soon, if Obama has his way, there will be no more private insurance. Maybe you think Geico execs can then just go to work for the government?

    Think again. You were the ones who sponsored Beck. They will never forget.

    Fighting wasn't just an option for you. It was the ONLY option.

    World communism — the hardcore variety — is a step closer today.

    Don Hank

    http://laiglesforum.com

    Suggestion: Maybe you need to switch from the gecko to the chameleon, because you have changed your colors and turned your coat.

Dear Reader: If you don't mind taking part in a controversy, write a brief email to the companies that pulled their ads from Glenn Beck. Let them know that treachery has a price. They can side with the enemy all they want, but no one can force we the people — yet — to buy their products.

Send your red hot email to:

zeroteam@jbcumberland.com;

info@woundedwarriorproject.org

service@jos-a-bank.com;

toughbook_sales_support@us.panasonic.com;

info@cinergyhealth.com;

media@medco.com;

corp.communications@mckesson.com;

Sandra.Kelder@wyndhamworldwide.com;

kempt@hq.usps.org;media@aarp.org;

daryl_richard@uhc.com; laura.stein@clorox.com;

d.bernard@wsj.com;

vincent@roche.com;

media.relations@RadioShack.com;

mediarelations@pepboys.com;

btucker@adt.com;

pr@equis.com;

customerservice@gold101.com;

info@60plus.org;

media.help@apple.com;

mjaronski@darden.com;

tyler.mason@phs.com;

customer.service@ups.com;

kdoria@scottrade.com;

info@sepracor.com;

webtest@geicomail.com

And keep checking the DefendGlenn.com site for further updates.

Further commentary on Glenn Beck vs sponsors:

Geico complains about the "inflammatory nature of the comments on a program" overshadowing "our message and causing GEICO to be drawn into a national debate."

Interesting, because Geico sponsors several far-left talk shows, including that of Rachel Maddow, who drag us all into sordid one-sided debates. Just for starters, Maddow singled out and criticized black people in particular who resisted the obligation to stay on the Democrat plantation and voted against same-sex "marriage."


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rwlrp7AQtyQ&feature=related

Rachel Maddow calls white guys racist because they think Obama is a racist. She says when they accuse Obama of being a racist, that is "racial invective." So, Geico, is there an assumption here that no black person could possibly hate whites? If so, what do you base that assumption on? Is there a study, for ex, showing that black people are incapable of hating white people? What about those blacks who SAY they hate whites? Are they lying? What about Hispanic Aztlan kooks who say they want white Americans out of their country? What about "liberals" — white and black — who hate white people enough to take away their rights to work and go to college based on achievement and make it all about race? How is that possibly not anti-white racism in anyone else's world but Rachel's tiny one? And how is it not inflammatory? Geico? Are you out there?

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/rachel-maddow-gops-overt-racism

But worse, Rachel actually indirectly threatens Geico's entire industry, by supporting the now very unpopular and controversial Obamacare plan, which ultimately would inevitably result in an exclusively government run health insurance industry. How is promoting the abolition of the insurance industry not "overshadowing your message," Geico?

But let me help you orient your thinking here, Geico: It is not so much the inflammatory nature of a commentator's comments, but rather their factual vs non-factual nature that inflames. Rachel is so far removed from the reality of ordinary Americans, the ones who buy your insurance (remember them?), that her show is a constant source of inflammation to us. She may not have the same kind of eccentric humoristic genius that Beck does, but she is abrasive to the tender sentiments of millions of Americans who love our way of life and are sick and tired of people like her trying to malign it and mock our values.

So if Geico is going to pull the plug on the infinitely more sane, talented and rational Beck for telling a joke that is controversial or inflammatory, then they should have pulled Rachel's plug a long time ago because she is not just picking on a far-left congress person but on every decent American.

Nancy Pelosi, whose Senate demeanor proves she has tyrannical tendencies, is just as abrasive and inflammatory as Rachel, whom Geico sponsors, and annoys decent Americans with common sense much more than Beck, whom Geico maligns, and yet it is precisely because of his poignant words about Nancy that they say caused them to pull out of his show.

This becomes comprehensible only if one considers how scary the White House avowed communist Van Jones is and how terrified Geico must have been when this cowardly bully pulled the race card, the cheapest trick in the book, on Geico and Beck. Geico lacked the spine, the cool and the wits to stand their ground and defend one of the last great Americans standing in a losing battle for our rights. And for that they deserve to be disgraced and face the potential loss of customers.

BTW, I have heard time and time again that the Gecko does not measure up pricewise to at least one other insurance company, and I urge anyone now insured by Geico to think again, go back to the drawing board. It strains the credulity to believe that any company that shells out that kind of money to advertisers can possibly offer the best deal in town, no matter what they say.

But here are some real questions behind the obfuscation:

Why was Beck the only commentator who pointed out that there's a commie in the White House? And how long will America tolerate the untenable situation of an enemy on the public payroll?

And why aren't these the issues we are debating, instead of whether somebody's joke went too far for proper etiquette?

Finally, it is conservatives and libertarians who most staunchly defend capitalism. Yet the traitor list above shows that perhaps the majority of big business elites aren't worth defending because they readily sell out our cause when they think we hurt their bottom line. Let's be careful in our evaluation of capitalism. I almost never use that word any more, because I have seen that, when it comes to Big Business, business and government are in bed with each other in most cases, and that is not pure capitalism. It has another name: fascism.

Let's use the term "free market," and let's recall that the kind of businesses who pulled their ads from Glenn do not fall into that category.


© Donald Hank

 

The views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
(See RenewAmerica's publishing standards.)

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Donald Hank

Until July of 2009, Don Hank was operating a technical translation agency out of his home in Wrightsville, PA. He is now retired and residing in Panama with his wife and daughter.

A former language teacher, he holds an undergraduate degree in French and German from Millersville State University (PA), a Master's degree in Russian language and literature from Kutztown State College (also in PA), has studied Chinese for 3 years in Taiwan at the Mandarin Training Center, and is self-taught in other languages, having logged a total of 8 years abroad in total immersion situations.

He is also the founder of Lancaster-York Non-Custodial Parents, a volunteer organization that provides Christian counseling for non-custodial parents.

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