Beck, along with the other Right-wing Rentboys, just wants to bash Obama, or whatever progressive happens to wander into his view. Consistency, reasoning, any actual intellectual content, is irrelevant. Just bash.

Strange man, yes. Difficult to figure out, no.

For being a MORON, he captures the truth rather well in this instance, Both systems are totally captured by their respective drivers, islam there and corporatism here. Neither will allow significant deviation in the political spectrum to upset the status quo. So we have neo-national-socialism, and they have theocracy. Both are gross perversions that have locked the respective cultures into self destructive cycles.

I wonder which will crash first????

Looking at the pictures of a couple of million people in the streets of Teheran makes me wonder -
1. Why didn't we do this in 2000. this would be a far different country under Gore
2. If we took to the streets like this, the healthcare problem would soon get solved!
3. We should take a lesson from the Iranians.

Why should the Washington Post give a rat's ass about what a freak show like Beck would have to say?

So, and handful of inbreds mourning the passing of fascism is JUST LIKE hundreds of thousands of Persians opposing its birth?

Goofballs do not actually think Obama is a totalitarian fascist bent on destroying the world. They are trying to get other goofballs to think that.

It's like a nitrous oxide party.

Except Glenn Beck. They get the nitrous out of his skull.

I believe Beck would be better described as deeply stupid than as strange.

You missed 2/3 of the Beck idiocy.

Question:Isn't regulation really a common sense approach to containing human greed?

Glenn Beck: No. Self-regulation is the common sense approach to regulating greed. What our founders called indispensable, the application of the laws of nature's God....

...No government is going to be able to regulate us, unless it's an oppressive government. We must regulate ourselves.

Bucks Co., PA: If you were the President right now, how would you handle the financial crisis inherited from the previous administration?

Glenn Beck: I would first start going to the average person and asking them to support the big corporate entities. Common sense tells you that it's unreasonable for the little guy to carry the big guy.

Beck questioning whether there's any real difference between the two parties is especially odd, since his own show features daily tantrums about the Democratic agenda, which he routinely compares to the Nazis.

Because the GOP isn't destroying itself fast enough, I think Beck should get more press time outside his own little Fox News echo chamber.

And btw, am I completely wrong in observing Ahmadinejad has more in common with rightwing fundamantalists (Bush) than centrists/reformists? (Obama)

I really think that Beck has a very low I.Q. He is not faking being dumb, he really is DUMB.

tulsatime pretty much nailed it. (Not the Beck is a MORON part- that's been evident for some time.)

More troubling is the parallel systems of government that was Mussolini's Italy and the U.S. of A. since the early 20th century.

Fascism is more than goose stepping brownshirts and military adventurism. . .

He saves the level of "Believe in something, even if it's wrong! Believe in it!" inanity for the end.

"I don't understand why so many on the left who believe in Darwinism don't let it apply to a business standpoint. Let the banks' lose their tails, they need to. It's harsh and painful, but I don't think any animal lover would be walking around trying to staple tails back on monkeys as they became humans."

What Steve didn't note was that, after making this statement, Beck promptly broke down into tears.

He gets like that,
-Z

What a strange man.

He's a loser baby.

Why should the Washington Post give a rat's ass about what a freak show like Beck would have to say?

Seconded. Beck is deranged. Period. He's not any more interesting than that.

Glenn Beck is a dick.

Glenn Beck is approaching the event horizon. Propaganda is supposed to distort reality to make it consistent with the propagandist's ideology. Inconvenient facts can be erased and stories woven out of whole cloth. But there must always be some connection to reality. Very well developed propaganda regimes, like the one in Nineteen Eighty-Four, erase all differentiations and nuance and the masses loose their orientation and place in the world. This is where Beck is. He sits at the event horizon where a devolved ideology, in his case naked vitriol, unattached to reality drives the narrative.

I think the easier question to answer is what awful parallels doesn't Beck see?

Truth is, I suspect that Beck sees zig-zags as parallel lines.

Geez-Louise Benen..."...What a strange man."

Says it all...no...quit giving credibility to this insane man as if his voice has a place in American thinking. The reality is no one should even be giving this twerp a place to say anything and quoting him here equates to a visit to a mental health facility and talking to a heavily medicated patient about Venus. Nothing...and I do mean nothing this goober says is worth addressing attention to. His name should only refer one to medication as in take your Beck med.so you don't flip out.

Not even sane enough for FAUX... but they put him on anyway.

I don't understand why so many on the left who believe in Darwinism don't let it apply to a business standpoint.

That's because Beck has never actually read Darwin. If he had read Origin of the Species, he would have noticed that the author goes on at length about how humans take care of their old and infirm, build hospitals and insane asylums, etc.

Beck can't tell evolution from malthusianism.

Photo of Glenn Beck and Al Franken,

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_xXVbcmGg_dg/RXgvpnfQz-I/AAAAAAAAABg/6aEF_sbrtvU/s200/beck.jpg

until that moment he was perfectly sane!

Who wants to bet Beck sleeps with a teddy bear?

Only a simpleton could think there is truly any difference between the two parties. They both support maintaining an empire abroad, the addiction to Endless Growth policies at home (fueled by cheap and plentiful energy), corporations grazing at the federal trough, government run by banksters and lobbyists, keeping the McMansion, Happy Motoring and Consumer economy going forever...

Take the partisan blinders off and wake up.

Is Beck's teddy bear also a rentboy?

Photo of Glenn Beck stabbing himself in the tongue with a fork,

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5490/606/1600/BeckTour1.jpg

Apparently while institutionalized. During the 'lost years'.

Beck's teddy bear is 'bi-polar bear'.

And note the bandage on his wrist in the photo.

What a strange man

Listen Beck, I served with strange men; I know of strange men; strange men are friends of mine.

Beck, you're not a strange man. You're just a dick.

Granted, I didn't read the context, only the quote supplied above, but this time I think Beck makes a lot of sense. We don't have Mullahs, but we do have two parties, and if you aren't in one or the other you are shut out of the system. Further, the Bush-lite criticism has a lot of merit, considering that Obama has shown himself to be as bad as Bush in regards to issues of presidential powers, indefinite detention, torture, and secrecy, and even worse by not only defending all those Bush policies but going so far as to suggest preventative detention!

So yes, I'm a Democrat, I supported and believed in Obama during the election, and I am severely disappointed by how much he has supported Bush policies, effectively giving us no alternative to them.

Oh, c'mon Steve. Beck isn't strange at all. He's an entertainer with a big contract, and he just wants to make sure he gets a nice, fat contract renewal when the time comes.

teebee and radio are entertainment. There was a brief time when there was a mild concern for the commons in our mass media, somewhere back near the Bronze-Age, but that mild concern evaporated long ago.

Beck is just doing what he does: entertain for money.

My Glenn Beck hypothesis is that he doesn't actually believe what he says. It's a schtick, and he's making sacks of money cranking this particular organ. If there was a more lucrative niche in far-left propaganda, he'd be covering the Earth Liberation Front and promoting "FNC Tree Parties" (sorry for the pun).

It doesn't make sense because it doesn't need to. He's an entertainer. If I'm right about this, I wonder if that's actually worse.

Our strength was that we were a melting pot." -- Glenn Beck.

Glenn Beck said that? Glenn Beck??? Isn't Beck a racist asshat, who's doing his best to stop any hint of "melting"? Or am I thinking of someone else? It's hard to keep those asshats apart; they all look and sound the same...

That Glenn Beck is taking his newfound prominence and using it to promote a summer standup comedy tour tells you everything you need to know about this moron. That he thinks he has talent makes him as pathetic as Dennis Miller, who is equally talent-challenged (which is why they both became public wingnuts, since people who are even dumber than they are, are an easier crowd to play with.

Algernon (and everyone else who points out that Beck is just an entertainer looking for an audience dumb enough to buy what he's selling who will do whatever it takes to do so) you're correct that your analysis makes it actually worse in figuring out what kind of person Beck is.

Why would The Post give Beck the time of day, much less an interview?

What a strange man.

It goes much, much deeper than that, I’m afraid. What bothers me more than Beck’s paranoid and deeply stupid ravings is the fact that the Washington Post is treating him like someone who’s ideas ought to be taken seriously, rather than the Fox “news� clown that he is.