Glenn Beck’s frog boil

Wait—“did Glenn Beck just kill a poor little frog, on national TV?” said Jason Linkins in The Huffington Post. On his Fox News show, Beck threw, or pretended to throw, a frog in a pot of boiling water to prove some point about how John McCain would have slowly boiled us alive, but President Obama’s agenda is so hot we jump out of the pot, like a frog—or something. (watch the clip) If there was no frog, the only thing “murdered was Beck’s metaphor.”

It’s hard to know what to make of Beck’s “bizarre live stunt,” said Kim LaCapria in The Inquisitr, unless he’s “amping up his campaign to win the title of ‘craziest pundit who doesn’t rehearse.’” But he does say on the show that the frog was fake, just like most Republicans and Democrats. Beck himself ended up in hot water because the bit about the fake frog was left out of “the most viewed version of the stunt on YouTube.”

“I don’t blame him for being pissed, either, about the underhanded edit of the clip,” said Allahpundit in Hot Air. I mean, if the “anti-Beckers” need to have a “meltdown,” they should save it for something more real than “frog-gate”—“even PETA was chill.” As for Beck’s “vivid visual metaphors,” sure, some of them weird me out, but hey, “the guy’s a showman.”

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He’s clearly not a biologist, said Kevin Drum in Mother Jones. The old saying about throwing frogs in a pot of cold water and gradually heating it—that “they’ll mindlessly poach themselves” before they realize the danger—may be a “useful metaphor,” but it’s also untrue. If the water’s cold, they jump out; if it’s boiling, they die. It’s time to retire the metaphor.