OK, enough. We finally reached our breaking point with Glenn Beck on Friday night. Crooks and Liars has always been a watchdog site -- we watch the
April 13, 2009

OK, enough. We finally reached our breaking point with Glenn Beck on Friday night.

Crooks and Liars has always been a watchdog site -- we watch the liars and thieves and crazies who come on your TV sets and we run the clips so you don't have to watch their shows. We always strive to find the wingnuttiest, most hypocritical, most mendacious and outright asinine examples we can find every day -- and nearly always they come from our friends on the right.

But Beck has recently become a special case. Every day for the last couple of months, when we've surveyed the wreckage of that day's right-wing video, Beck's have been the craziest, wingnuttiest shows out there. If he is where the American Right is heading, he bears watching.

But at some point the circuits just overload.

Friday night's show, which was all about extending Beck's previously stated belief that Obama is marching us into fascism, and helping plump Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism thesis, was that point.

Since I'm a student of the subject of fascism, I've written a lengthy response at my blog. But I'm not going to burden C&L readers with it.

We're not going to drop covering Beck altogether. We'll continue to report it whenever he makes a dangerous pronunciamento, of course, because our reasons for monitoring him in the first place have never gone away: His rhetoric is laden with particularly dangerous extremism, and he has the potential to wreak great damage. Indeed, that reason for keeping watch on him couldn't be more acute. And so simply reporting the dangerous stuff will keep him on our front pages enough.

But I dunno about the rest of you, but I've had my fill of the Daily Krazee from Planet Wingnuttia, particularly the silly stuff like the weeping and the ongoing affair with that great right-wing mind, the Spawn of Lucianne. Beck's "912 Project" looks likely to devolve into a cult we can just call Jonahnism. It's been fun, but it's simply right-wing dumbassery for its own sake.

We get it, Glenn. Hopefully everyone else will, eventually, too.

Can you help us out?

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