Glenn Beck Now Owns Civil Rights

It's the dawn of Glenn Beck's much-debated Restoring Honor rally on the anniversary of MLK's Dream, and Washington Post scribe Dana Milbank—the author of a forthcoming Beck biography—takes a somewhat incredulous look at the white guy with the borderline racist track record and his bid to co-opt the civil rights movement. Beck, he writes, "apparently has determined that the best defense is to be patently offensive."

"Blacks don't own Martin Luther King," Beck has argued, and in fact it is Beck who owns King, writes Milbank. Claiming the GOP has advanced civil rights since the days of Andrew Jackson, Beck then "updated the meaning of the civil rights movement so that it is no longer about black people; it is about protecting anti-tax conservatives from liberals," Milbank writes. "Civil rights leaders, he said, 'purposely distorted Martin Luther King's ideas.' Over the past century, Beck reasons, 'no man has been free, because we've been progressive.' " And so, Beck takes to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial today as King's self-anointed successor.
(More Glenn Beck rally stories.)