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Glenn Beck must have been feeling the pressure from Virginia Foxx yesterday in the Absurd Wingnuttery Championships. So, after Foxx compared the liberal health-care reform package working its way through Congress to terrorism, Beck went on his Fox News show and compared the package to the 9/11 attacks:

Beck: On 9/11, we experienced a feeling we had never had before -- when the buildings and our markets and the economy came falling down around our ears, we realized -- 'Oh my gosh. Our country isn't unsinkable.'

We came, on that day, to the understanding that this Republic is fragile. Here we are now, a decade later. I'm on the air again, warning you that our government cannot sustain our massive spending. The system will collapse if we continue down this progressive path.

Ten years ago, I could have shouted every single day about Osama bin Laden and his wacky, crazy threats to kill Americans in New York. And no one would have been willing to stand in line two hours while some security officers made grandma take her shoes off. No one would have done it.

But don't you see -- while the government is still not willing to do these things, today, America is different. America has changed. Washington, we're not going to let you get away with it anymore.

Look, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Conservatives are awake. 912ers are willing to do the hard things. We know what this means. We're taking time out of our busy lives, taking time away from their families, they're attending town-hall meetings -- you think they wanna do that? They are calling their representatives -- how many times do we have to be yelled at by your people in Washington? to work against the enactment of health care reform.

They are reading 2,000-page health-care bills on the weekend. They 912ers are willing to stand in line and take our shoes off before the plane actually hits the tower.

Glenn Beck has a long history of exploiting the 9/11 tragedy for the sake of ratings and rantings. (Who could forget his encomium to the widows? "It took me about a year to start hating the 9/11 victims' families.")

Indeed, you could make the case that his current stellar rise was built on such exploitation. Beck was a nobody until he started making incendiary remarks about Muslims on air and attacking liberals for their insufficient patriotism after 9/11 and cheerleading the Iraq invasion as a post-9/11 necessity. It's what made him famous in the first place.

And now he's springboarding from that to leading an open revolt against the liberal policies Americans just voted to implement, throwing a tantrum because no one believes in disproven and discredited conservative dogma anymore. No one, that is, except Glenn Beck and his hapless followers.

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It seems respectable Republicans who like to think of themselves as "intellectual" conservatives are growing dismayed at the living, breathing monster they themselves have unleashed upon us:

Such insiders point to theories running rampant on the Internet, such as the idea that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and is thus ineligible to be president, or that he is a communist, or that his allies want to set up Nazi-like detention camps for political opponents. Those theories, the insiders say, have stoked the GOP base and have created a "purist" climate in which a figure such as Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) is lionized for his "You lie!" outburst last week when Obama addressed Congress.

They are "wild accusations and the paranoid delusions coming from the fever swamps," said David Frum, a conservative author and speechwriter for President George W. Bush who is among the more vocal critics of the party base and of the conservative talk show hosts helping to fan the unrest.

"Like all conservatives, I am concerned about this administration's accumulation of economic power," Frum said. "Still, you have to be aware that there's a line where legitimate concerns begin to collapse into paranoid fantasy."

Frum and other establishment Republicans have spoken out in recent days against the influence of what they view as their party's fringe elements.

Some are pressuring the Republican National Committee and other mainstream GOP groups to cut ties with WorldNetDaily.com, which reports some of the allegations. Its articles are cited by websites and pundits on the right. More than any other group, critics say, WorldNetDaily sets the conservative fringe agenda.

Well, as observed last week, getting unentwined from the liked of WorldNetDaily and its extremist clientele is easier said than done.

No, the right-wing populist beast is loose. You fellas have the right idea, but you're a bit late. We're already well into the great thrashing about that comes with any set of death throes, such as those now besetting movement conservatism. You can see how it plays out on the ground now, particularly at the Tea Parties. And it isn't pretty.

A camera crew from Free Speech Radio showed up in D.C. on Saturday for the big GlennBeckFest. It was frightening and disturbing and even got ugly. The reporter, Leigh Ann Caldwell, describes what happened:

We met a group of nearly a dozen "912ers." They adorned t-shirts with the fractured Revolutionary War snake, the symbol of their group created by Glenn Beck. At the end of the 10-minute interview, they demanded my contact information and a picture so they could "find" me if they didn't like our work. I took that as a threat, declined to give them my contact information and walked away. They followed and continued with their demands. I continued to decline.

One of the women then yelled into her megaphone that "the woman in the black shirt works for ACORN." She commanded the crowd to take my picture. They found out my last name from a previous interviewee, so she then yelled my full name into the megaphone and nearly 50 people surrounded and swarmed me, putting cameras in my face as they heckled and laughed. The crowd then followed me down Pennsylvania Avenue for the next ten minutes.

Robin Bell, the cameraman, posted that and other videos at his channel at YouTube.

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