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I'm not sure exactly what Roger Ailes and his fellow poobahs at Fox News were thinking when they hired Glenn Beck to join them in January 2009, but it is a telling fact that Beck's primary professional background was as a morning zoo-show host -- someone who specializes in goofy stunts and wild-over-the-top envelope pushing. Because that, of course, is exactly what they got for the next couple of years, before they finally decided to cut their losses.

Now, there are plenty of things to object to about Glenn's trainwreck of a career at Fox, particularly the noxious and yet little-noticed way he almost effortlessly mainstreamed extremist ideas and rhetoric, most recently with his full-bore descent into promoting John Birch Society conspiracism. Undoubtedly, Beck's relentless fearmongering and the vicious eliminationism of his rhetoric were important components of what made Beck so toxic. Media Matters has compiled an impressive list of the "50 Worst Things Glenn Beck Said On Fox News" that gives a pretty good rundown -- but is really only a start.

Ultimately, the worst damage he caused was to the shape of our national discourse -- from all these factors, but especially in the way he wrapped it up in a "zany" morning-zoo-show format, dragging that discourse down to the level of a prearranged pro-wrestling match. As Will Bunch puts it:

Because the truth is that Beck's ouster isn't really the end of the nightmare, but just the beginning of the end. Over the last 27 months, Beck -- and let's be clear that he had a lot of help from the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin and Sean Hannity and Rand Paul and all the folks in the Tea Party Movement -- managed to do incalculable harm to the American body politic, that Beck was exactly like Tom and Daisy Buchanan in "The Great Gatsby" who "smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness.."

You'll probably hear a lot about how Beck coarsened the political debate and how his words may have incited violence, but I think the wreckage is a lot more substantive, to actual policies that affect Americans every day. You see, there was a reason that Beck was so fond of a political theory called the Overton Window-- so enamored, in fact, that he made it the title of his (officially) fictional "thriller" novel last summer. The Overton Window is a notion that you can radically move the parameters of political debate by pushing talk to the outer limits, so that ideas that were once deemed extreme suddenly appeared to be normal.

Ironically, no one mastered the use of the Overton Window better than Beck. With all the focus on the leading edge of Beck's craziness -- the "caliphate" stuff, the flirtation with "the FEMA camps," or President Obama's "deep-seated hatred" of white people -- it's easy to foget how he rationalized once out-there ideas to millions of American conservatives, and how those ideas became ingrained in the Republican agenda that has thwarted progressivism from virtually the day Obama took office.

... You could go on and on -- the talk-radio jihad against big government that has put gutless Democrats so on the defensive that they no longer fight to protect vital programs but only over whether to agree to "steep" spending cuts or "draconian" ones, or the fear-mongering on terrorism and Gitmo that made quivering members of Congress afraid to house terror suspects in our supermax prisons. Don't think that Beck's nightly burst of insanity didn't have a lot to do with these things, because they did.

Don't believe me? Then ask a fellow in South Carolina named Bob Inglis who was a Republican congressman until he told his constituents to "turn off Glenn Beck," and lost a primary to an upstart who got 71 percent of the vote. Why do you think the Republicans in Washington remain in lock step, even as 90 percent of what they stay in lock step for is bat-guano crazy?

As Amato said, Beck inflicted the damage that conservatives needed him to inflict. Now the rest of us get to pay for the long, slow, and perhaps impossible job of repairing it.

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Finally, Glenn Beck really will get to feel a little like Martin Luther King -- because he is free, free at last, God almighty, free at last.

Unfortunately, our long national nightmare ... is probably just switching to a new phase.

He explained to his audience yesterday on Fox that he was leaving his regular show there because, gosh, he had to have his arm twisted in the first place just do it:

BECK: When Fox was generous enough to offer me the time at 5 o'clock, I originally didn't take them up on it. I turned them down. One of the reasons was I didn't want to -- I just -- didn't wanna do this. I hated doing it at the other place. This place is sweet! -- in comparison. But I also knew -- believe it or not, anybody who knows me in my real life as everybody -- wee little Erin will tell you too -- I avoid confrontation like nobody's business. Unless I am forced. But it also -- I don't like it.

But -- sometimes you have to stand. I took the job two years ago because I thought I had something important to share. I really thought if I could prove my case -- that something wicked this way was coming -- something in America was wrong, America would listen. And they have.

What noble guy. Brings a tear to your eye and puts a swell in your heart, doesn't it?

Beck's removal from the Fox daily lineup really is, as David Brock puts it, "A victory for civil discourse". (Media Matters, by the way, has put together a list of the 50 Worst Things Glenn Beck Has Said.)

And it was overdue. As George Zornick at ThinkProgress explains:

Beck entered the year without one-third of his earlier audience. Only months into his show, advertisers began deserting his program, and pressure by liberal groups resulted in a loss of nearly 300 advertisers during the course of his show.

Last month, Fox News officials told the New York Times anonymously that they were “contemplating life without Mr. Beck.” The Times also reported that “[m]any on the news side of Fox have wondered whether his chronic outrageousness — he suggested that the president has ‘a deep-seated hatred for white people’— have made it difficult for Fox to hang onto its credibility as a news network.”

That seems like a reasonable concern.

Beck, meanwhile, is actually in a bizarre defensive-gloating position, telling his radio audience this morning:

BECK: Let me just tell you something. Liberal left -- let me make a prediction. ... One year from now, you on the left will be crapping yourselves so much -- you haven't, you haven't crapped in your pants as much as you will in a year from now, as you did since you were a child. Maybe more. You'll be making -- you'll crap yourself more than when you were a baby! And you will find Jesus. You will suddenly find religion and you will be kneeling at some altar lighting candles every day praying to Jesus that Glenn Beck would please just do 5 o'clock on the Fox News Channel.There's my prediction.

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Fox News is pretty rapidly becoming the Conspiracy Nutcase Network, what with Glenn Beck going all-in as a John Bircher, along with Sean Hannity's headfirst dive into the swamps of Birtherism.

After Hannity's initial foray into Birtherism in defense of Donald Trump on Wednesday, he devoted both of his subsequent "All American Panel" segments to defending Birtherism again. On Thursday, the panelists included former Maryland Gov. Rob Ehrlich, poli-sci prof Caroline Heldman, and ex-Imus producer Bernard McGuirk. It went like pretty much like the first foray:

HANNITY: First of all. What's the deal? Produce the birth certificate it is over and done with. Chris Matthews wants it.

MCGUIRK: This is why Donald Trump should throw his hair into the ring. He legitimized this issue. People say why not just show it. The other thing it took away is that Joy Behar was conspicuously silent. She is a bully she will go over -- she will go after Sharron Angle, Donald Trump she has nothing to say.

...

HANNITY: If I asked for the birth certificate, can I get it?

HELDMAN: I assume that you could, Sean.

HANNITY: Is it go all the way back to 1975?

HELDMAN: Sure.

HANNITY: Could you get your birth certificate?

MCGUIRK: In a heartbeat.

HANNITY: Look, what I like about this, every pejorative, birthers and this and that. Chris Matthews was the guy -- why don't we get rid of it and move the issue aside so it never comes up again?

HELDMAN: How about common sense takes over and it never comes up again.

HANNITY: Wait a minute, but he did talk in his book prayers and he went to a Muslim school and he talk all about all these and he studied the Koran and prayers at sunset were most beautiful things he saw in life. He spent a lot of his youth in Indonesia.

HELDMAN: And?

MCGUIRK: Show the birth certificate and get it over with.

HELDMAN: Wait, what does - have to do with being born in the United States? How is that material to whether or not he was in the United States? What is the logic?

HANNITY: Why won't they release the birth -

HELDMAN: What is the logic?

HANNITY: Why don't they just release it and get it over with. The only reason they don't release it is because it insults him.

Last night, it was more of the same, with a different panel, including civil-rights activist Ron Daniels, Fox contributor Peter Johnson, and Republican "strategist" Dee Dee Benkie. Daniels tried pointing out, repeatedly, that Obama has in fact produced his birth certificate -- but that seemed to fly right over everyone else's head:

HANNITY: Do I think he was [born in America]? Yes. Do I think this is odd that they won't produce the birth certificate? It's beginning to get odd to me.

...

BENKIE: Yeah, but why not produce it? It's so easy. Here it is -- on TV, on billboards, whatever. Why not just bring it out? Why not show it?

DANIELS: It's shown time and time again. Do we trust the Hawaiian authorities or not? I don't understand this. There is a problem here. There's something going on here, that people keep talking about this birth certificate, and there's a significant amount of people believe in it.

HANNITY: Why haven't they just produced the certificate?

DANIELS: They have! They've shown it! You can go see it -- anybody can go see it, just like you can go see a copy of --

HANNITY: That's not true!

BENKIE: That's not true. It's never been out.

HANNITY: Because they've never allowed anybody to see it. That's the point.

BENKIE: It's never been out.

HANNITY: It's never -- see, you're agreeing with me that it's odd.

BENKIE: It is odd. It's very odd.

Yes, very odd, very odd indeed. Odd that no matter how plainly the evidence is given to people like Hannity, they keep insisting that it hasn't been presented.

OK, I'm going to write this verrrrry slooooowwly, just so Hannity and his panelists and the likeminded Trump fans don't miss anything:

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Glenn Beck, we can all see, is really plunging wildly over an emotional cliff in his increasingly bizarre attempts to defend his wild conspiracy theories about the unrest in Egypt. And it's been such an epic meltdown that it's been hard to keep track of all its many variations.

But the researchers at Media Matters happened to catch one of the more hilarious of these: Beck bringing on a onetime commanding general in Iraq -- Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin -- to defend his theory as being on the money. That's right: the guy who brought you Abu Ghraib, on to warn of yet another dire threat.

Of course, the last we happened to notice Boykin poking his head out of his lead-lined nuclear bunker was when he was explaining how Marxism is being insidiously implemented in America under President Obama -- rather like another general we once knew:

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There really isn't much to say about Glenn Beck's opening rant for his Fox News show yesterday. It really pretty much speaks for itself.

Which is to say: Better ready that nice rubber room for the pudgy guy.

It does feature what will no doubt become a classic line:

BECK: You want to call me crazy? Go to hell. Call me crazy all you want!"

See, this is like all those times Beck has pretended that he was asked his viewers, "What if I'm right?" He never seems to reckon much on the consequences of his being wrong.

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Like Steve Benen, I'm beginning to wonder if our favorite Big-Time Wingnuts are about to implode under the critical mass of their own overpowering wingnuttery. It seem as though Sarah Palin's bizarre "WTF" rant of the other night -- while not particularly spectacular in the context of a political career rich with embarrassing moments -- may have been the pebble that finally tipped even her reflexive defenders in the other direction. (You sure can't find anyone outside of Planet Palin who will defend it.)

Then there's Glenn Beck in the past couple of days. Conor Friedersdorf's reaction reflected the consensus: "the fact that Roger Ailes and his associates air this kind of nonsense –couched in these kinds of assurances! – is indefensible." As Benen says:

Over the last year or so, Fox News' Glenn Beck has lost about a third of his audience, which is a pretty significant drop, and may very well lead the deranged media personality to think of ways to bring viewers back.

One way, for example, may be for Beck to be even more creative when sharing crazy visions of global affairs. Yesterday, the strange man did his best to explain events in Egypt with a take that really has to be seen to be believed. Chris Hayes called it "a tour de force of paranoid ignorance," which sums it up nicely.

As you can see, all he's really doing is reinforcing what even some of Beck's Believers are now beginning to realize: that he's an ignoramus peddling cockamamie conspiracy theories with no regard to facts or truthfulness.

You see, Beck believes that events in Egypt are the culmination of conspiratorial forces he's been railing about for some time now -- essentially revolving around an obscure book by French anarchists that nobody is actually reading, The Coming Insurrection.

Basically, Beck foresees a Middle Eastern "Caliphate" overtaking Europe and China controlling big chunks of new territory, all fueled by a "Marxist" and "Islamist" conspiracy:

I believe that I can make a case in the end that there are three powers that you will see really emerge. One, a Muslim caliphate that controls the Mideast and parts of Europe. Two, China, that will control Asia, the southern half of Africa, part of the Middle East, Australia, maybe New Zealand, and God only knows what else. And Russia, which will control all of the old former Soviet Union bloc, plus maybe the Netherlands. I'm not really sure. But their strong arm is coming. That leaves us and South America. What happens to us?

Then Beck went on Bill O'Reilly's show and explained the nutshell version:

BECK: No, I think we're actually possibly the witnessing Archduke Ferdinand moment. Archduke Ferdinand was the guy who was killed -- shot, a few months later started the First World War. I think we're in real danger.

...

BECK: I understand that, but what you're not taking into account is that that is what the average person thinks, just like the average person on the street of -- of Cairo thinks they're swept up in some freedom movement. It is not about freedom. It is being orchestrated by the Marxists, communists and primarily also the Muslim Brotherhood.

Sean Easter and Todd Gregory at Media Matters have a thorough roundup of the madness, and conclude by observing:

All of this was offered up in service of his theory that the protests in Egypt are the manifestation of The Coming Insurrection, an obscure book that French police believe was written by a member of a small group of anarchists. Beck has repeatedly described the anonymous author (or authors) of the book as "communists." He's tied George Soros and President Obama to The Coming Insurrection, as well.

So, a diverse group of the Egyptian people are in the streets protesting an autocratic leader, and Glenn Beck has decided that this is directly connected to an anonymously written anarchist tract from France that he's been obsessing about for the past two years?

Normally, we are in the business of debunking the falsehoods and smears that Beck promotes. But how do you debunk pronouncements that quite obviously bear no relationship to reality?

The real question is: Why would anyone ever take this man seriously on any subject?

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UPDATE: The Supreme Court rejected the claim today without comment. [H/t marionetta]

We've always said that wingnuts never, ever give up. And that would be especially true of the wingnuttiest of the current crop, the Birthers -- because their theory has been so manifestly disproven so many times that you'd think they might have a clue by now. But no.

Now they're expanding their theory. They're arguing that Obama, per the constitutional requirement that he be a "natural born citizen", is disqualified from such status because his father was a British subject of Kenyan birth.

What's really funny about this theory is that these fetishists of all things from the Founding Fathers would thus have disqualified one of the leading founders, Thomas Jefferson, from the presidency.

What's perhaps not so funny about it is that the Supreme Court has this case on its docket.

Unsurprisingly, the wingnuts at WorldNetDaily are all over the story:

The Supreme Court conferred today on whether arguments should be heard on the merits of Kerchner v. Obama, a case challenging whether President Barack Obama is qualified to serve as president because he may not be a "natural-born citizen" as required by Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution.

Unlike other eligibility cases that have reached the Supreme Court, Kerchner vs. Obama focuses on the "Vattel theory," which argues that the writers of the Constitution believed the term "natural-born citizen" to mean a person born in the United States to parents who were both American citizens.

"This case is unprecedented," said Mario Apuzzo, the attorney bringing the suit. "I believe we presented an ironclad case. We've shown standing, and we've shown the importance of the issue for the Supreme Court. There's nothing standing in their way to grant us a writ of certiorari."

There really shouldn't be much to worry about here, truthfully: the lower courts have all tossed out this suit, and indeed the Third Circuit Appeals court ordered Apuzzo to explain why he shouldn't be sanctioned for filing a frivolous lawsuit (an order that was later vacated.

On the other hand, considering that these appeals were tossed not on the merits of the case but on the lack of standing that Charles Kerchner actually had in filing the suit, and the fact that the Roberts Court has shown a disturbing tendency to liberalize standing when it suits the conservative wing, maybe we shouldn't be so blithe.

And what's the basis of their theory? Back to WND:

Apuzzo is arguing the "Vattel theory," which asserts that the term "natural-born citizen" as used in the Constitution was defined by Swiss writer Emer de Vattel. Vattel, whose work, "The Law of Nations," was widely known and respected by the founding fathers, used the term to mean an individual born of two citizens.

According to Apuzzo, Congress and the courts have addressed the question of who can be an American citizen, for example regarding former slaves, Asian immigrants, and American Indians. However, the term "natural-born citizen" has never been altered.

"The courts and Congress have never changed the definition," said Apuzzo. "The founding fathers understood that the commander-in-chief of the armed forces needed to have two American citizens as parents so that American values would be imparted to him."

Apuzzo said the Supreme Court had clearly accepted Vattel's definition of "natural-born citizen" in "dicta," or statements made in opinions on cases addressing other matters. He cited Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall's opinion in the 1814 "Venus" case, in which Marshall endorses Vattel's definition.

This is pretty odd reasoning. Especially when you consider that the same standard would have disqualified Thomas Jefferson -- whose mother, Jane Randolph Jefferson, was born in London, England:

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OK, here's your daily bit of comedy, courtesy of Glenn Beck ...

Yesterday, Beck brought his Black Robe pal, Rabbi Daniel Lapin, on to support his latest theory: that the new European Union Parliament building in Strasbourg, France, is actually designed to look like the Tower of Babel. Or at least, one well-known version of it.

Beck showed the two buildings side by side, then launched into a long disquisition on the Biblical meaning of the Tower of Babel (zzzzzzzzz) and then wrapped it all up thus:

Beck: You're not saying, Rabbi, that they intentionally are building the Tower of Babel.

Lapin: I think they are. I really do. I do believe and was told that the design of the headquarters of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, was -- designers were asked to make it resemble the Tower of Babel.

Beck: They said -- because we called -- we tried to verify, and what they say is, [laughs] they're just reflecting like the Coliseum.

Lapin: Yeah, that's what we want to build in Europe -- right? A place where Christians got fed to lions.

Too funny. Of course, as a matter of fact, as the Wikipedia entry notes (citing a press release): "The architects were inspired by Roman amphitheatres."

Well, duh:

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Just wondering if this is the tone we can expect from those victorious folks on the Right for the next couple of years ... I guess this is what they mean by "no compromise."

Via Thomas Wellborn at Alan Colmes' Liberaland, who observes that this cretin identifies himself as a "Buchananite conservative."

From his website’s masthead:

Political Byline

The writings of an thinking American

Wanna bet this is one of those guys who demands that immigrants learn the English language?

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Just when you thought Glenn Beck couldn't make himself into more of a complete cartoon figure, he goes and tops himself.

This is one for the ages. Dana Carvey couldn't have done a better Church Lady impression.

No wonder so many conservatives are penning pieces about how embarrassing it is to be a conservative these days.

This guy is the Face of the Conservative Movement in 2010. Watch 'im and weep, kiddies.