Caleb Howe discovered something very peculiar at the usually reliable Google Maps.  If you search Lincoln Memorial, the map takes you to the FDR Memorial.  (Out of curiousity, I ran the same search, and got the same result.)

It’s entirely possible that this is a glitch or a mistake in the usually reliable Google Maps site.  However, it does seem a bit odd that the usually reliable Google Maps would have this specific error showing up immediately before Glenn Beck’s August 28 Restoring Honor gathering — being held, just coincidentally, at the Lincoln Memorial.

I’m just saying….

UPDATE:  Check out the comments to Caleb’s post, since they offer a reasonable explanation for how this might have happened — and it might not be Google’s doing (although Google should correct it).

UPDATE II:   A friend sent me a screen grab, ’cause you just know Google is going to try to shove this one down the memory hole.

Incidentally, Bing, which is my preferred search engine, gets it right:

Andrea Shea King has an interesting post today, castigating Mark Levin for his “petty” and “envious” attack on Glenn Beck.  Her post is very useful in highlighting the divisions in the conservative side of the political spectrum, divisions that are sometimes so deep, both as to style and substance, that they might foreshadow conservatives managing to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in 2012.

As for me, I neither watch nor read Beck, but occasionally find myself listening to Levin on the radio because my carpool driving falls during Levin’s show. I invariably turn Levin off after about 5 minutes. His substance is great, but his style is so angry, I can’t deal with it.  I’m with Andrea in finding off-putting the name-calling and chronic derision.

Thinking about Levin made me think of the idea of the whole notion of the Happy Warrior. Certainly Reagan had that quality. He saw and named America’s enemies, but he had a sunny optimism that instantly destroyed any attempts to call him paranoid.

Palin has that sunny quality, but 2008 and 2009 soured her a great deal, and she’s hewing towards a somewhat more paranoid, or I should say angry, style.  Lately, one has the feeling that her political views are shaped as much by personal anger as they are by common sense and love for America.  This development is unsurprising given the unprecedented personal attacks against her, but I don’t think it augurs well for her playing a huge leadership role in the near future.

Barack Obama is an interesting study in the Happy Warrior phenomenon because he lulled willing, credulous Americans into thinking that this man with a history of personal anger and angry associations was indeed a Happy Warrior. What a lie.  But you can’t just blame Obama or the even the media.  The American public was perfectly willing to be fooled by the Magic Negro Happy Warrior, so that the voters themselves could have for themselves that happy feeling of post-racialism.

Obama’s current flailing in the opinion polls reflects, not only his policy failures, but the fact that Americans are learning to dislike this whiny, angry, arrogant and dour man in the White House.  Pre-election promise aside, he has about as much charm, optimism and warmth as “Jimmah” Carter.  This is political death.  As politicians from Teddy Roosevelt, to Franklin Roosevelt, to Eisenhower, to Kennedy, to Reagan have shown, Americans want an optimistic leader, one who believes in them and their potential.

The immediately problem as I see it is that conservatives don’t have a viable Happy Warrior candidate on the 2012 horizon.  While I do see cheery, feisty up-and-comers, such as Rubio and Ryan, they’re too young and untried for 2012.

My question for you is:  Who am I forgetting?  What true happy conservative warriors are out there to uplift the American public in 2012?

UPDATE:  With the exception of Palin, most of the Happy Warriors named in the comments (and I agree with people’s assessment’s there) are in entertainment and punditry.  Only Palin is a politician.  Based on this post, Don Quixote and I got into a larger discussion about American optimism.  We wondered if 40 years of “progressive” education, which teaches children that all Americans are either bullies or victims, has created a generation incapable of the happy optimism and love of America that characterized both Reagan and Walt Disney. Even those of us who love our country are defensive about that love, rather than boundlessly and reflexively cheerful about America’s greatness.

The American intelligentsia has a love affair with Communism that will not die.  The dead Soviets, the dead Hungarians, Czechs, Albanians, Poles, Bulgarians, etc., the dead Chinese, the dead Koreans, the dead Africans, the dead Cambodians, the dead Vietnamese, the dead Cubans, and the dead Latin Americans are all irrelevant.  Those are just mistakes from Communism done the “wrong” way.  The Left has absolute faith that, done the right way — the “American way” — Communism will bring about a paradise of plenty and perpetual peace.  All of which shows, as I’ve learned rather painfully over me life, that brains and sense are not the same thing.

One of the worst things that has happened since 1989 is that a new generation is growing up educated by the Left about the joys of Marxism in the abstract, but without any offsetting evidence of the horrors of Marxism in practice.  Yes, China and Cuba are still out there, but China has become such an important trading partner, and Cuba is so whitewashed by Hollywood, the average kid doesn’t see either as an example of Communism.  Those of us who grew up during the Cold War could hear people at Berkeley or Columbia waffle on about the glories of the Soviet (and the evil that was Reagan), but the evidence of our own eyes was pretty compelling.  When people keep trying to escape their own country, you suspect that more is going on than meets the ideologically blinded academic eye.

Glenn Beck is trying to meet and challenge this scary cultural ignorance.  Although I don’t watch his show, I’ve heard from many that he’s been on an educational crusade, trying to make his viewers appreciate just how disastrous Communism in action is.  (Actually, I would broaden this to say “socialism.”  Communism was just one variation of this political plague.  The word “socialism” better encompasses alternative forms of this type of government, including the Nazis.)  Jamie Glazov is especially appreciative what Beck is doing, because his family suffered so terribly under the Soviets:

The tortures included laying a man naked on a freezing cement floor, forcing his legs apart, and then an interrogator stepping on his testicles, applying increasing pressure until the confession surfaced. Imagine the consequences of no surfacing confession. Indeed, many people refused to confess to a crime they did not commit.

Daughters and sons were raped in front of their fathers and mothers — for the sake of extracting “confessions.”

***

Both of my grandfathers were exterminated by Stalinist terror. Both of my parents, Yuri and Marina Glazov, were dissidents in the former Soviet Union. They risked their lives for freedom; they stood up against Soviet totalitarianism. They barely escaped the gulag, a fortune many of our friends and relatives did not share. I come from a system where a myriad of the closest people to my family simply disappeared, where relatives and family friends died under interrogation and torture for their beliefs — or for simply nothing at all.

Please read the whole thing.  It’s not just an indictment of socialism, it’s also an attack against the “intellectuals” who shunned dissidents who actually experienced the evils of Communism.  How much better to live in a world of intellectual theory, with PepsiCo as the big enemy, than acknowledge the fact that the ideology you so cheerfully embrace is responsible for more than 100 million deaths, and uncountable incidences of torture and suffering.

Just in case he actually runs for office, the Leftist media is already planning one line of attack against Glenn Beck.  They’re thinking that they can nail him on taxes, just as he went after so many Democrats who were found, wittingly or not, to have underpaid their taxes:

No one has been less forgiving than Glenn Beck when it comes to Democrats with tax problems. Not just the well-known ones like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner but also less serious ones such as Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, whose husband only recently paid off $6,400 in tax liens on his auto repair business, and Nancy Killefer, who withdrew her nomination to be White House chief performance officer, citing a $946.69 tax lien on her Washington home.

Their tax issues are just one indicator of “a culture of corruption among some of the left,” Beck declared just last month in a segment on his hugely popular Fox News television show, in which he branded Geithner, Killefer, Solis and a handful of other Obama nominees “tax cheats,” whom he wouldn’t trust “with my children, let alone my children’s future.”

Mocking the excuses offered by the nominees, Beck sarcastically intoned: “Oh, the tax thing, it was an accident. It was my husband’s fault. I didn’t do it, he did it. I didn’t mean to do it. I was just working hard for the people.”

So what to make, then, of the fact that Beck has had his own minor tax problems over the past few years?

As Beck evolved from a medium-market local radio personality to a one-man media empire with top-rated radio and television shows, best-selling books, a monthly magazine and a traveling one-man comedy tour, his production company, Mercury Radio Arts, has at times struggled to keep up with the heightened tax and filing demands accompanying his success.

The same article goes on to explain, at some length, the nature of Beck’s problems, and to point out that they parallel the problems many on the Left had in trying to comply with their tax obligations:  the tax code is so complicated, it’s hard to get it right.

And it’s that last little point that makes me think that I wouldn’t care, and most people wouldn’t care, if Glenn Beck ran (which I think is a bad idea for other reasons) and the Left tried to smear him with tax issues.  You see, what distinguishes Beck from the Left is that Beck, as a pro-individual, anti-government guy, he isn’t in favor of constantly increasing the tax burden on ordinary Americans.  Likewise, Beck, unlike Charles Rangel, isn’t writing the tax code.  Also, Beck, unlike Tim Geithner, isn’t being put in charge of America’s economy.  So yes, Beck has in common with Leftist politicians the fact that he too can’t figure out what the heck is going on tax-wise, but he parts ways with them in that he is neither a government employee, nor is he a big government maven.  Someone who works for the government, and wants to increase the tax burdens the government places on ordinary citizens, has a much, much higher duty than anyone else to get it right.

I have to open this post by saying that I have never seen Glenn Beck, not even for a second.  I don’t like the emotional school of journalism and, in any event, I prefer to read, not watch, my news.  I do appreciate Glenn Beck, however, for two things:  his ability and willingness to break the stories no one else will touch, and his commitment to classic libertarian (that is, “liberty from government”) principles.  I like that in a man.

Not having seen Glenn Beck isn’t the same as not knowing about Glenn Beck.  And one of the things I do know is that he probably ranks second to Sarah Palin in the amount of hatred he generates in the liberal heart.  To them, he is Satan incarnate and must be destroyed.  A perfect example of this is Nancy Franklin’s review of the Glenn Beck show in the most recent issue of The New Yorker.  I have to say that it’s a fascinating review, because Franklin’s whole problem with Beck, when you boil her article down to its essentials, is that she believes his political views are evil.  In that, it’s a startling contrast with Charles Murray’s review of Glenn Beck’s show, which approves of Beck’s politics, but disagrees with his periodically dishonest or careless tactics.  To me, the latter review is an entirely credible approach — and one to which Beck should pay attention — while the former review is just a meaningless bit of “I hate him” journalism.

To expand upon my point about unfair criticism (he has a terrible show because he’s an evil man) versus fair criticism (he makes valid points but cheats by using invalid tactics) let me quote from and discuss each review.  Here’s Nancy giving the game away in one of the very early paragraphs:

Some see him as a joke, and some see him as a danger, and some—especially those who like guns, don’t want health-care reform, and feel that their freedom is somehow threatened by every political initiative of the Obama Administration—are grateful to him, for his efforts to “take back America.” In March, Beck started the 9.12 Project—a forum for frustrated folks, meant to “bring us all back to the place we were on September 12, 2001.” On that day, the Project’s online mission statement says, “we were not obsessed with Red States, Blue States or political parties. We were united as Americans, standing together to protect the greatest nation ever created.” It’s true—we were. But nothing about Beck’s 9.12 Project has even a tinge of that post-9/11 spirit of generosity. One of the “principles” of the organization is “I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable.” Beck invariably uses his real or feigned bromance with the Founding Fathers to explain his crabbed selfishness; he justifies this “principle” with a quote from George Washington, which actually has an entirely different spirit: “It is not everyone who asketh that deserveth charity; all however, are worth of the inquiry or the deserving may suffer.”  (Emphasis mine.)

Did you get that? Nancy’s problem with Beck is that she firmly believes that Government should force people to be charitable. It’s totally evil of him to believe, as both the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence would have us believe, that government exists primarily to stand aside.  Foolishly, she tries to defeat this perfect libertarian principle by quoting George Washington in support of charity.  Now, I ask you, did Glenn Beck dis charity or did he simply say it’s not charity anymore when the government stands in front of you and takes your money at gun point?  Nancy, however, takes Washington’s classic Christian formulation and implies that Washington was in favor of socialized medicine.

This drumbeat is constant in Nancy’s review, even as she’s conceding that, well, maybe he was actually right:

Throughout the year, Beck has gone after Administration officials, repeatedly showing irresponsibly edited video clips, in which they say things that make them easy marks. Sometimes, though, the clips really do raise questions about someone’s judgment or self-awareness, even when you hear a longer version of the comments. Take Anita Dunn, the former White House director of communications. (She was filling the post this year on an interim basis and left last week.) Dunn gave a speech at a Maryland high school—Beck played a snippet so often that you could repeat it by heart—in which she clumsily used a quotation from Mao as a positive life lesson, and it’s no wonder Beck latched on to it. Van Jones, who was brought in by Obama to spearhead the creation of green jobs, was undone, in part, by Beck’s ceaseless screenings of his video past, and resigned in September. (The Administration should have known that some of Jones’s speeches, and other questionable parts of his record, would be made public; the Internet-savvyness of the Obama Presidential campaign seemed to vanish not long after the election.)

So, if I understand this correctly, Beck is a foul excuse for a journalist because he goes after Administration officials who say stupid things.  (Apparently this was a good tactic during the Bush years, but is an unfair tactic during the Obama years.)  Except that, actually, they really did say certain things and the administration should have known that they were hiring people who would make the American public see red, both in anger terms and political terms.

And so it goes.  Nancy doesn’t like Beck’s style (which I can understand, because I don’t either), but what she really doesn’t like is his politics — something she ought to have confessed at the top of the column, just as I confessed at the top of this post that I know of Beck only by reputation.

Charles Murray has a much more interesting, and devastating, take on Beck — why is it that the loudest, truest, strongest voice of classic libertarianism keeps cheapening himself, and taking the risk that he destroys his message, by careless and dishonest tactics?

It’s been like that for six weeks of watching. Beck is spectacularly right (translation: I agree with him) on about 95 percent of the substantive issues he talks about. He is a full-throated libertarian in a world of wishy-washy Republicans. The man is a gifted communicator. His style doesn’t happen to be one I like, but many times I’ve sat there on my sofa wishing I could make the same point as effectively.

But Beck uses tactics that include tiny snippets of film as proof of a person’s worldview, guilt by association, insinuation, and occasionally outright goofs like the fake quote. To put it another way, I as a viewer have no way to judge whether Beck is right. I have to trust that the snippets are not taken out of context, that the dubious association between A and B actually has evidence to support it, and that his numbers are accurate. It is impossible to have that trust.

So here’s the unbearable paradox. Beck really has had important effects on the way the Obama administration and its legislation is perceived. It is conceivable that if healthcare goes down to a razor-thin defeat, Beck will have made the difference. If that turns out to be the case, he will have made a far greater contribution to the survival of the American project than ink-stained wretches like me can dream of having. And I want to shut him up?

I don’t really want to shut him up. I want him to change. Take those enormous talents and make all the arguments that he can legitimately make. Keep the cutesy gimmicks (I understand that we’re talking entertainment here), but have an iceberg of evidence beneath the surface. Fox is making so much money from the show that it can afford the staff to do the homework.

Absolutely!  Yes.  That’s right.  And an honest reviewer would have said the same, while at the same time acknowledging that she also has a huge problem with his political ideology.  Instead, though, Franklin attacked his ideology and buried the core problem with Beck, which is his honesty.

I would love it if Beck and his staff would take Murray’s criticism to heart and clean up the show’s act.  The show is a useful tool but, as Shakespeare said, “”Reputation, reputation, reputation! Oh, I have/ lost my reputation. I have lost the immortal part of/ myself, and what remains is bestial. My reputation,/ Iago, my reputation!” Beck cannot simultaneously (and appropriately) savage the reputation of the amazing collection of radicals surrounding the president while, at the same time, routinely sacrificing his own reputation for honesty and diligent research.