The other day, our friend Markos went on Countdown and called out Glenn Beck and his fellow teabaggers for their incessant use of eliminationist rhetoric.
Of course, this deeply upset Glenn Beck, who responded on his show yesterday (transcript via Jed):
I want to start in an unusual place. I want to show you what the founder of the Daily Kos, which is this far-left wing blog, said. Here's what he said just the other day about tea parties:
This is what the people voted for, and it's one thing to oppose it on policy, it's another thing to use the kind of exterminationist, eliminationist rhetoric that they're using in appealing to violence and that sort of thing.
OK. Extermination talk? I haven't heard any of the extermination talk. It sounds like, again, he's calling us Nazis. How can you paint the right like Nazis?
Maybe Glenn Beck hasn't heard any eliminationist rhetoric because he's one of the loudest voices using it, and doing so on a regular basis:
As I noted awhile back:
Beck actually has been engaging in eliminationist rhetoric in attacking progressives since June of last year, though he's been recently ratcheting it down to new depths.
I compiled the video above with a sampling from the past nine months. In it, you can see Beck call progressives a "cancer" (multiple times), "the disease that's killing us," a "virus," a "parasite," "vampires" who will "suck the life out" of the Democratic Party, and claim that progressives intend the "destruction of the Constitution" and will strike it a "death blow".
Since then, we've been treated to such disquisitions as this:
Beck: What they're about to pass is not a tumor. Because the doctor can come over here and say, 'Yeah, there's a tumor here, and we've got to go in and cut this out.' I don't know if you can cut this tumor out. Maybe not. But you can try. But what they're about to pass is a bloodstream disease. It will be injected into our system and it will be incurable.
Beck: I think they're gonna pass this thing. They are gonna do whatever it takes to pass this, and they're not going to go the traditional way, they are gonna go the way of snakes and cockroaches. They're gonna crawl out in the cover of darkness, and they're going to pass this, make it happen one way or another.
Apparently, though, Beck is confused about just what Markos meant, because of course he couldn't be talking about people like Beck. Somehow, it has to do with Beck's Planet Bizarro-style confusion about political categories -- as in Beck's reconfiguration of things to equate neo-Nazis with the "Progressive Right":
