Yes, that headline is a rhetorical question. Because no mainstream columnist or commentator in America has ever been as far to the left as Pat Buchanan or Bill Kristol is to the right. Much less Glenn Beck.
Once, I believed Beck merely had the least brainpower of the prominent right-wing commentators. Good for a 30-second head-shaking visit while punching buttons on the remote.
But that was before he started spouting his Obama-is-not-a-Nazi-wink-wink theme. And before he moved over to Foxaganda in February and hosted a few ex-CIA and ex-military guests who engaged in armchair war gaming for a civil war against Obama's "dictatorship."
It became clear to me that despite the paucity of his gray matter, Beck's ultimate mindset is no different than the Klansmen who occasionally showed up to intimidate people during my childhood in southwest Georgia. Not too bright, to be sure, but influential because people who would never participate in a lynching never worked to bring to justice people who did.
Beck's demonization of President Obama depends on a rancid upsidedown discourse grounded in profoundly disturbing cultural resentment, which contains its own special illogic. It's not original, nor clever, but it nevertheless has an impact. Just as its fascist precursors had an impact. From his program today:
BECK: I'm not saying that [Obama] doesn't like white people, I'm saying he has a problem. He has a ... this guy is, I believe, a racist. Look at the way...look at the things he has been surrounded by ...
Let's give [sic] his new green job czar. The guy is, again, black liberation theology, a black nationalist, um, who is also an avowed communist. He comes in and he puts that guy in. Well, wait a minute. How many people with this kind of philosophy do you need to have in your life before we start to say show me your friends and I'll show you your peo... your future?
And then there was this twisted bit on "Obama-brand reparations" that will settle "old racial scores" on July 23:
Some folks - even a few at Daily Kos - have suggested that Keith Olbermann, Ed Schultz and even Rachel Maddow - are opposite numbers for Beck and other right-wing commentators. It's difficult to imagine a deeper slander.
Nothing done by the corporadoes who run our media surprises me. Decades of rubbing elbows with people who make William Randolph Hearst angelic by comparison have immunized me. But, still, I wonder just how far they will let Beck go. Or spur him to. Will they give him a pass the day that he, like the Rwandan radio provocateurs of 15 years ago, starts calling Obama and his supporters "cockroaches" to be stamped out?
(h/t to Media Matters)