Missed in the brouhaha over Sarah Palin’s verbal flub about our North Korean “allies,” and much more telling:
According to host Glenn Beck’s own transcript, Beck’s very next utterance was to proclaim that the “mystery” jet contrail recently seen in California (explained weeks ago (even by Fox News online) as almost certainly an optical illusion created by still air and a jet contrail from a known UPS delivery flight) was in fact a secret two-stage missile launch by the Chinese government to assert their power over America, “sending a signal that the world has changed.”
Beck then went on to state that the Chinese “control the world.”
Did Sarah Palin, would-be leader of the United States, disagree with any of this? Nope.
Palin’s verbatim response: “Well, that’s right.”
For Beck’s (and apparently Palin’s*) version of reality to be accurate, of course, these four logical conditions must also be true:
(a) China can launch missiles in or near U.S. waters in broad daylight without provoking any American response; (b) the Pentagon either does not know this, and therefore cannot defend our shores, or they do know, and are now engaged in a massive coverup (either one of which must be sufficient for both Beck and Palin to question their avowed support of the Pentagon); (c) for the missile to have any meaning, China must have assumed that the Pentagon would understand the source and significance, something even Americans ourselves apparently cannot assume, according to (b); and (d) China must have also either assumed that the Pentagon would be cowed and not respond, or been eager to start a hot war with massive loss of life for no explicable reason.
Beck’s assertion — with which Palin showed no disagreement whatsoever — requires belief in no less than four different insane things — and that’s even if the contrail hadn’t already been fully explained.
And this gets virtually no comment anywhere.
Apparently we’ve all been numbed by stupidity for so long that while the media can still grok an obvious up-is-down screw-up, the presence of mind-blowing nests of illogic immediately adjacent to the famous gaffe… that’s just dismissed as normal.
*Some may suggest that Palin was agreeing only with Beck’s unique notion of Chinese global dominion. After all, Beck’s assertion about a Chinese missile occurred a full eight seconds before her statement of agreement. One can defend Palin simply by insisting that eight seconds is an unreasonably long time to retain information.