"All contributions made to the Special Operations Warrior Foundation (SOWF) will first be applied to the costs of the Restoring Honor Rally taking place August 28, 2010. All contributions in excess of these costs will be retained by SOWF."
So SOWF gets leftovers. If the event indeed grossed $5.5 million, it's not necessarily accurate to say that all of that money was paid to the SOWF like Beck's website claims:
With your support and help we were able to raise more than $5-million dollars for the Special Operations Warrior Foundation.
Unless, of course, the concert managed to raise significantly more than $5.5 million to cover the overhead. And the overhead is massive. There's the cost of renting the National Mall and the Lincoln Memorial from the National Park Service (created by evil progressives who Beck hates). There's the advertising and promotion. There's the equipment, travel and security. How much did fellow grifter Sarah Palin earn? And why, if this was a charity event to honor Jesus and the troops, would she take any money at all? We know her rate alone is $75,000, plus expenses and riders. The night before, there was a Beck event at the Kennedy Center. How much did that cost?
Beck's legion of followers deserve a full accounting of where and how their donations were spent, especially given Beck's history of dealing under the table. Make no mistake: there's nothing illegal -- just unethical and immoral. And if Beck raised, say, a million dollars for SOWF, that's still pretty admirable, all things considered. But if not, it's yet another lie to insist that the entire $5.5 million went to the SOWF when it, in fact, might not have.
As Bunch reports, the "Restoring Honor" concert wasn't originally intended to be about God or the troops at all. It was originally intended as an over-the-top way to unveil Beck's The Plan, his forthcoming book. We can only conclude that it would have been impractical for a publisher to rent the National Mall for a book launch, and soliciting donations for a book launch would look especially unsavory -- even for Beck.
So they painted over The Plan idea and came up with this hasty and muddled "Restoring Honor" idea. The Plan B. Put another way, God and the troops and SOWF were The Back-up Plan -- second fiddle to Beck's book.
One way or another, all of this benefits the Beck neo-faith-healer empire.
Unfortunately, faith-healers and scam artists aren't going anywhere. Professional wrestling is still very popular despite being exposed as pre-planned and injected with steroids. But it's important to peg these hucksters at the correct level of seriousness. Beck isn't a healer or an evangelist or a serious political thinker. He's a matchstick man. A huckster. To regard him as anything more -- to insist that his events are more historic than a rock concert in the park or that his TV and radio shows are more nationally significant than a late night preacher or a morning zoo deejay -- is a dangerous mistake.
(Update: The sentence about Scott Shannon was updated to add specifics and a link to the source material was added.)
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