Glenn Beck: It’s not ‘baseless’ to claim Obama hates white CEOs
"If I get out of control and start leveling baseless charges," Glenn Beck claimed on his Fox News Channel show Monday, "guess what happens? I'm fired."
But that evidently didn't stop him from later accusing President Barack Obama of allegedly refusing to meet with BP's CEO because the British oil giant's top executive is white.
The Fox News host played a clip of President Obama declaring, “My experience is when you talk to a guy like a BP CEO, he’s going to say all the right things to me. I’m not interested in words, I’m interested in action.”
He then went on to rebuke Obama for saying he'd meeting with the president of Iran, but not the chief of BP.
Lampooning Obama, Beck remarked, “I’ll meet with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad… without any preconditions because we have to be able to talk… We’ll sit down, have some tea, some crumpets… Yeah, you’re a raging lunatic but we can get through to you and trust you. Now, the BP CEO? Depart from me, evil one!”
“What is it that the dictator of Iran… has in the credibility department that the CEO of BP doesn’t have?” Beck quipped.
No, Beck signaled.
“He’s a white CEO," Beck remarked. "Maybe that’s it… White CEO’s… they don’t want to pay their tax dollars and have those tax dollars go to ‘inner city kids.’”
He added that some blogger "at Huffington Post" or elsewhere would accuse of him of making "baseless accusations against this president."
"You're right," Beck said. "I'll stop, I'll just let the president say it."
Beck then played a comment Obama made in 1995, which he proceeded to take out of context: "And I really want to emphasize the word 'responsibility.' I think that whether you are a white executive living out in the suburbs who doesn't want to pay taxes to inner-city children for them to go to school..."
As Media Matters notes, Beck left out the rest of Obama's comment, which noted "both of those groups have to take some responsibility if we're going to get beyond the kinds of divisions that we face right now."
This isn't the first time Beck has made an inflammatory racial comment.
Beck told the host of Fox & Friends last July that “this president has exposed himself, I think, as a guy - over and over and over again - who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.”
Moments later, Beck added, “I’m not saying he [Obama] doesn’t like white people, I’m saying he has a problem. This guy is, I believe, a racist.”
His comment subsequently sparked a campaign to drive advertisers from his program. Raw Story reported on a law student's campaign against Beck earlier this month.
Source: The Raw Story (via Bloggerheads)