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Today on his radio show Glenn Beck backed away from the tea party protests, by claiming that he didn’t promote the tea parties, he just went to one. He then blamed CNBC’s Rick Santelli for founding the movement.

Here is the audio of Beck courtesy of Media Matters:

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Beck claims that he was hammered by listeners for going to a tax party, and doesn’t understand how he was driving them? In the eight days before the protests, Beck did 5 in show promos, 1 segment on his Fox News show, and 3 commercials for the gathering in Texas, that he hosted. He wasn’t sitting on the sidelines covering it. He was on stage talking to crowd, and emceeing the event. Maybe Beck has multiple personality disorder? Radio Glenn Beck was just attending the protest. Television Glenn Beck was the promoter. Radio Glenn must have had no idea what TV Glenn was doing.

This is more evidence of how quickly the right wing is trying to bury yesterday’s low turnout. Beck’s erroneous remarks give me a chance to clear something up. The tea party concept did not start with Rick Santelli. They began with the Ron Paul campaign in 2007, but since mainstream Republicans have nothing but contempt for Dr. Paul, who is one of the few Republicans with any integrity, they reinvented history and gave the credit to Santelli. Yesterday, the Campaign for Liberty welcomed the GOP into “their movement.” The problem is that they didn’t join Rep. Paul’s movement. They hijacked it.

The post that Beck was criticizing that he claimed didn’t have a byline is by Brandon Friedman and is running on the Huffington Post. I know this because it says so in the byline. Beck is upset because in his piece Friedman associated the views of Beck and Michele Malkin with militia members. Republicans wanted this to be seen as a mainstream movement, not a kooky get together. They consider Ron Paul and his supporters kooks which is why they were never mentioned.

Since their gatherings yesterday did come off looking like lonely fringe conventions, Beck feels compelled to back away and blame Santelli, who didn’t even attend a tea party, because he said that he had to work, which makes me wonder if those who did show up had jobs, or are they living off the same government money that they were protesting against? The Republican Party has no soul, so it tried to steal one, but in the end the protests lacked sincerity and a point. In this way, they mirrored the current empty state of the GOP.