Suggestion for Glenn Beck: Just rename your new Fox News show "The Apocalypse Now! Hour" and spare us the pretense. Because the looming-doom schtick is already getting beyond predictable.
Every night it's a new conspiracy, same as the old conspiracy. (Sometimes Beck promises these stories will "make blood shoot out your eyes." Which makes me mostly want to change the channel.) Last week, for instance, we had several episodes on Mexico's impending collapse. Plus the socialism/communism/fascism thing.
On Monday night, it was Iran. For this, he brought in a fellow believer in the notion that Iran wants to bring about Armageddon, an evangelical author named Joel Rosenberg.
Rosenberg and Beck, in fact, together created some of the most bizarre daytime cable-news TV I've ever seen at CNN's Headline News last year, talking insider-fundie Bible babble about the certain signs Jesus was coming back (see here and here for the prime examples).
This time, the ranting is reserved to a conspiracy theory about that new Iranian satellite and the secret meaning of its name.
But Beck also wants us to delve the Biblical meaning of it all:
If I may -- If you look at the extremist Muslim version of the Mahdi, and then you read the Book of Revelation, he suspiciously looks like the Anti-Christ. Seeing that he's the one that's running a one-world government and executing everyone that disagrees with him from Babylon -- I don't know where I've heard that one before.
Are you scared yet?
Me neither. Considering that I've been hearing about the apocalypse around the corner from the likes of Beck, Rosenberg, and Hal Lindsey since I was a kid.
But keep watching Beck, and after awhile you'll be afraid. Of him.
