While I was on vacation last week, Glenn Beck wrapped up his regularly scheduled apocalyptic fearmongering with a Friday special that laid out the future as he fears it.

It's pretty much a Mel Gibson production, with lots of Road Warriors and other dystopian features.

The program opened with a warning that pretty much told us how crazy it was going to get:

Topics discussed on today's program may be disturbing to some viewers. The views expressed on this program are not predictions of what will happen, but what could happen. The panelists have been asked to think the unthinkable. Viewer discretion is advised.

Here's the future that Glenn foresees:

Our third scenario: Anger and discontent at home. The year is 2014. Many people are feeling disenfranchised. People are isolated from their political leaders -- they've been betrayed over and over and over again.

Internet connects like-minded people. And the 'Bubba Effect' arise in individual militias.

So then he brings on Gerald Celente, who has figured out how to turn what should be a sandwich-board prophecy business into a nice Fox talking-head gig:

Beck: Gerald, what happens to people when you start taxing like ...

Celente: Tax revolts. You heard it on CNBC yesterday.

Beck: But you're not talking about a tea party ...

Celente: Oh no, no. This going to be violent. People can't afford it anymore.

Look, the cities are going to look like Dog City. They're going to be uncontrollable. You're going to have gangs in control, motorcycle marauders. You're not going to have enough police and federales, just like Mexico, to control the situation.

I've been listening to Beck and O'Reilly and Hannity play out all kinds of future disaster scenarios for America under the Obama administration and am wondering if they've considered another scenario:

-- Obama turns out to be right. The stimulus plan works as advertised, America's economy gets rolling again, the global economy stabilizes, and everyone gets back on their feet again.

See, the main problem with this scenario is that gaming it out inevitably leads to the utter and complete repudiation of movement conservatives -- revealed irrevocably as the brain-damaged fools they are -- and the long-term ascension of liberal values. So I guess that's why they never game that one out.

What's especially noteworthy about this vision of America's future is that militias play such a prominent role. This may be due to the likelihood Glenn Beck largely shares their worldview. But it's also noteworthy because Beck is essentially promoting the concept.

Glenn Greenwald wrote a superb piece about this:

But now, only four weeks into the presidency of Barack Obama, they are back -- angrier and more chest-beating than ever. Actually, the mere threat of an Obama presidency was enough to revitalize them from their eight-year slumber, awaken them from their camouflaged, well-armed suburban caves. The disturbingly ugly atmosphere that marked virtually every Sarah Palin rally had its roots in this cultural resentment, which is why her fear-mongering cultural warnings about Obama's exotic, threatening otherness -- he's a Muslim-loving, Terrorist-embracing, Rev.-Wright-following Marxist: who is the real Barack Obama? -- resonated so stingingly with the rabid lynch mobs that cheered her on.

With Obama now actually in the Oval Office -- and a financial crisis in full force that is generating the exact type of widespread, intense anxiety that typically inflames these cultural resentments -- their mask is dropping, has dropped, and they've suddenly re-discovered their righteous "principles." The week-long CNBC Revolt of the Traders led by McCain voter Rick Santelli and the fledgling little Tea Party movement promoted by the Michelle Malkins of the world are obvious outgrowths of this 1990s mentality, now fortified by the most powerful fuel: deep economic fear. But as feisty and fire-breathing as those outbursts are, nothing can match -- for pure, illustrative derangement -- the discussion below from Glenn Beck's new Fox show this week, in which he and an array of ex-military and CIA guests ponder (and plot and plan) "war games" for the coming Civil War against Obama-led tyranny. It really has to be seen to be believed.

These people are not just "predicting" this kind of future. They actually are hoping it comes about. That's both creepy and scary.

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So it seems there's this Rooskie professor who thinks the United States is going to wind up following the path of the old Soviet Republic:

For a decade, Russian academic Igor Panarin has been predicting the U.S. will fall apart in 2010. For most of that time, he admits, few took his argument -- that an economic and moral collapse will trigger a civil war and the eventual breakup of the U.S. -- very seriously. Now he's found an eager audience: Russian state media.

In recent weeks, he's been interviewed as much as twice a day about his predictions. "It's a record," says Prof. Panarin. "But I think the attention is going to grow even stronger."

Prof. Panarin, 50 years old, is not a fringe figure. A former KGB analyst, he is dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry's academy for future diplomats. He is invited to Kremlin receptions, lectures students, publishes books, and appears in the media as an expert on U.S.-Russia relations.

But it's his bleak forecast for the U.S. that is music to the ears of the Kremlin, which in recent years has blamed Washington for everything from instability in the Middle East to the global financial crisis. Mr. Panarin's views also fit neatly with the Kremlin's narrative that Russia is returning to its rightful place on the world stage after the weakness of the 1990s, when many feared that the country would go economically and politically bankrupt and break into separate territories.

Dunno about you, but the results of the last election didn't seem to suggest any dissolution of the United States -- rather the opposite. We seem to be in the process of healing old divisions and coming back together after a decade of Republican-induced strife. We'll see if it continues. But Professor Panarin sounds like he has a bad case of the projections.

Of course, there's always that possible asteroid impact that's been all over the YouTubes, if you prefer your apocalyptic scenarios more, ah, complete.

Either way, I take some comfort in knowing that the cranks who keep predicting the end of the world are still with us. (Oh, hello, Pastor Hagee.) They've all been so wrong over so many years that I'd actually start to worry if they stopped the predictions.

For myself, I look forward to waking up to a new day and a new year this morning. It's as full of risk and promise as every day, but for some reason, this year is already looking better than the past eight. And that's good enough for me.

(Posting will be light today. We're going to be like normal people and mostly take the day off.)