Glenn Beck slaps Oprah!

Glenn Beck has not just joined the right-wing war on Oprah Winfrey, he’s holding himself up as some kind of living Statue of Liberty to lead the poor, huddled masses who are oppressed by her racism into the light of freedom. I kid you not.

In case you missed it, Winfrey recently told The Grio she felt that Trayvon Martin’s death was “parallel” to and, “in my mind, same thing” as the lynching of Emmett Till. Even though, almost in the same breath she added:

“You can get stuck in that and not allow yourself to move forward and see how far we’ve come. …We need to give ourselves a round of applause. In this country, with all of its injustices, look at what we’ve been able to do in the span of one man’s lifetime.”

It’s pretty clear to me that Winfrey was not saying the two events were literally the same but that she was speaking about their impact on and resonance with African-Americans. But instead of trying to understand what she meant or how an African-American might view the killing of Trayvon through a different prism than a white person, the right-wing has been frothing at the mouth with racial animus toward her.

Oprah sent the right into another tailspin relaying an incident in which she said she’d felt racially profiled when a salesclerk in Zurich would not show her a very expensive handbag.

So, leave it to Glenn Beck to join the outrage and use the opportunity to promote himself – the guy who was pushed out of Fox News after he infamously accused President Obama of hating white people – as some kind of racial liberator.

Beck said:

“We’re not the country that is trying to do the right thing. We are not that country. But the good news is, we are those people.”

Actually, what Beck meant is he is those people:

“Oprah Winfrey, you disgust me.
“…Why are you telling everybody else they can’t make it? Why are you telling us that white people are the problem? Oprah, I choose to be the person that America thought you were. I choose to be the person that will overcome the bad things in my life. Nobody’s going to tell me what I can and can’t do and who I am. I know who I am and I will not be beaten down by the system. And I will hold those people up that feel the same way, no matter what color. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me the ones that you have told ‘You’ll never make it.’ Send… to me the tempest-tossed because I hold my lamp beside a golden door.”

If anyone can show me where Oprah ever said that “white people are the problem,” then I’ll believe that Beck has a smidgen of credibility on the subject of her race remarks. Until then, I’ll keep on thinking that he has a bad case of Freudian projection.