Who is W. Cleon Skousen?

I am really pissed tonight so I am going to probably do a cut and paste job. If I do one of my regular posts I am going to curse too much. I am really trying to cut back on my cursing. Not because of the main stream folks who told me that they would publish and link more of my work if I didn't curse so much. (Fuck them) But because as my blog gets more popular, some of Mrs. Field's acquaintances and co-workers are starting to read it, and she says it embarrasses her when I curse. So there you have it.

Anyway, thanks to Danmell Ndonye, a young woman who cried rape where there was none; (I wonder if all the folks who were defending the Duke boys came to these boys defense up in New York? *crickets*) Rush Limp-boy who wants segregated school buses; (As if we don't have that shit now.) and Joe Wilson's dumb ass son, who doesn't think his daddy is a racist because he doesn't laugh at all those racial["distasteful"] jokes. (Maybe he just doesn't think those racial jokes are funny. Maybe he knows much better racial jokes. I mean who gives a f..-see, there I go again- who cares if he doesn't laugh at some jokes? Since when is how you laugh at a joke a measuring stick for racism? Give me a break! ) I find myself wanting to count to ten every time I start writing.

See why I can't blog tonight? Just one paragraph and my head is already about to explode with all the dumb shit going on in A-merry-ca.

Since I can't write anymore without going all Fred Sanford and getting the "big one", here is an excellent article from Salon.com about one of the people who started silly season here in A-merry-ca:

"By Alexander Zaitchik
Sep. 16, 2009

On Saturday, I spent the afternoon with America's new breed of angry conservative. Up to 75,000 protesters had gathered in Washington on Sept. 12, the day after the eighth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, sporting the now familiar tea-bagger accoutrements of "Don't Tread on Me" T-shirts, Revolutionary War outfits and Obama-the-Joker placards. The male-skewing, nearly all-white throng had come to denounce the president and what they believe is his communist-fascist agenda.

Even if the turnout wasn't the 2 million that some conservatives tried, briefly, to claim, it was still enough to fill the streets near the Capitol. It was also ample testament to the strength of a certain strain of right-wing populist rage and the talking head who has harnessed it. The masses were summoned by Glenn Beck, Fox News host and organizer of the 912 Project, the civic initiative he pulled together six months ago to restore America to the sense of purpose and unity it had felt the day after the towers fell.

In reality, however, the so-called 912ers were summoned to D.C. by the man who changed Beck's life, and that helps explain why the movement is not the nonpartisan lovefest that Beck first sold on air with his trademark tears. Beck has created a massive meet-up for the disaffected, paranoid Palin-ite "death panel" wing of the GOP, those ideologues most susceptible to conspiracy theories and prone to latch on to eccentric distortions of fact in the name of opposing "socialism." In that, they are true disciples of the late W. Cleon Skousen, Beck's favorite writer and the author of the bible of the 9/12 movement, "The 5,000 Year Leap." A once-famous anti-communist "historian," Skousen was too extreme even for the conservative activists of the Goldwater era, but Glenn Beck has now rescued him from the remainder pile of history, and introduced him to a receptive new audience.

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 he launched the 912 Project. That month, 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. The book tops Beck's 912 Project "required reading" list, and is routinely sold at 912 Project meetings where guest speakers often use it as their primary source material. 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."

What has Beck been pushing on his legions? "Leap," first published in 1981, is a heavily illustrated and factually challenged attempt to explain American history through an unspoken lens of Mormon theology. As such, it is an early entry in the ongoing attempt by the religious right to rewrite history. Fundamentalists want to define the United States as a Christian nation rather than a secular republic, and recasting the Founding Fathers as devout Christians guided by the Bible rather than deists inspired by the French and English philosophers. "Leap" argues that the U.S. Constitution is a godly document above all else, based on natural law, and owes more to the Old and New Testaments than to the secular and radical spirit of the Enlightenment. It lists 28 fundamental beliefs -- based on the sayings and writings of Moses, Jesus, Cicero, John Locke, Montesquieu and Adam Smith -- that Skousen says have resulted in more God-directed progress than was achieved in the previous 5,000 years of every other civilization combined.."

More here:

Big H/T to Greg Fuller for turning me on to this article.