I Bet He Has More Than One Ascot': Beck Parodies Intentional Misreporting by Mainstream Media

To quote Glennbeck.com, "You just know things are too good when Glenn busts out the pipe."

Glenn Beck busted out a pipe and smoking jacket today to mock the recent spate of misreporting from MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell - or as Beck called her, "Mrs. Alan Greenspan." In tones of dripping sarcasm interspersed with genuine outrage, Beck savaged Mitchell both for her hypocritical attacks on Mitt Romney's wealth, and for the blatantly dishonest bit of selective editing the network had done. For those of you who don't recall this most recent bit of media malfeasance, here's the Blaze's Erica Ritz explaining:

In the MSNBC clip, Romney is shown discussing Wawa’s convenience stores like he has never been to one before (presumably because he is “too good” for such an establishment).

Introduced by Andrea Mitchell saying: “I get the feeling–take a look at this– that Mitt Romney has not been to too many Wawa’s along the roadside in Pennsylvania,” Romney says: “I was at Wawa’s, I wanted to order a sandwich.  You press the little touch tone keypad, alright, you just touch that, and you know, the sandwich comes at you, touch this, touch this, touch this, go pay the cashier, there’s your sandwich.  It’s amazing.”

Momentarily speechless, Mitchell repeats, “It’s amazing,” as her guest breaks into sharp laughter.

Too bad the clip was taken wildly out of context.

In reality, Romney was illustrating the difference between private and public sector efficiency.  After telling a story where his friend had to fill out a 33-page form twice to complete a change of address with the government, Romney holds up touch-tone sandwich-ordering as an example of private sector efficiency– not as a marvel of how the “common” man lives.

Ritz also included the clip MSNBC used, along with the full clip - in context - both of which can be seen below. MSNBC's version:

The real thing:

As you can see, the MSNBC clip completely ignores the comparison Romney was trying to draw - a fact that was apparently lost on Mitchell, even after other people pointed it out. That, or she didn't care, considering that she still cut out the first part of the analogy when showing the "full" clip on MSNBC today, and didn't say anything that could be remotely construed as an apology. Watch Mitchell's "update" below:

Beck, quite understandably, had had just about enough of this kind of snobbery masked as populism. His blistering mockery can be seen below in full below:

"Romney was not talking about Wawa's ordering system by itself," Beck explained, infusing every syllable with the deepest sarcasm. "And by the way, it is fantastic, it's a fantastic ordering system. Not many other places or convenience stores have it. He was making a larger point about the private sector versus the public sector."

"I don't care if you're rich. God bless you if you're rich. I don't care if you're poor. I don't care if you're middle income," Beck finished off. "How about as a nation we stop having a problem with the rich? How about we start directing that time and that anger toward hypocrites, the stupid, and people who intentionally manipulate stories for political power, Mrs. Greenspan?"