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Open Thread below...

[H/t Media Matters.]

As one might expect, Glenn Beck has been simply cowardly about dealing with that report from the ADL titled "Rage Grows in America", which singled him out for special attention as the nation's newest "fearmonger in chief".

Beck has been largely silent about it. He only obliquely referenced it on his Fox News show earlier this week, exclaiming that "they" call him "anti-government" and heatedly denying that he is.

But on his radio show on Wednesday, he finally crawled out of his shell a little more, drawn out by a Timothy Rutten column in the Los Angeles Times discussing the report:

Beck: I'm just looking at a story from the Los Angeles Times today. The headline has my name in it, but it's really about you: "Who's watching Glenn Beck?" And then it goes into the -- "Much like the Depression-era demagogue from -- uh, Father Charles Coughlin" --

Anybody who knows history -- yeah. Yeah. I'm just like that guy.

Um -- "Fox is promoting a mass movement. Should his bosses be pulling the plug on him?" "For nearly a century, the Anti-Defamation League" -- which has as much to do, I believe, with the plight of the Jewish people as the National Organization of Woman has with the plight of women -- it is nothing, I believe, nothing but a political organization at this point. And I -- it, it kills me to say that.

I mean -- for the love of Pete, name the person that has been more friendly to Israel. Name the person that has spoken out more against the Holocaust deniers that are running Iran. Name the person who has stood up for Israel more than I have! Name the person in the mainstream media that speaks as passionately as I do -- not for some glorified Israel Zionist movement, but because I see the Jewish people as people! And the leaders of Iran as monsters that want to finish the job that Hitler started. You name the media person, Anti-Defamation League.

Well, first things first: Nevermind how obtuse a person must be who is neither a woman nor a Jew passing judgment on whether organizations with established histories of effectively fighting for the rights of either group has "anything to do" with their "plight." What really stands out about this rant is the stereotyped image Beck has of Jews, to wit, the only aspect of their "plight" worth mentioning is the defense of Israel.

In reality, the ADL has historically been focused on the much broader "plight" of the Jews represented by anti-Semitism and its pernicious effects. As you can see from just visiting the "About" section of their website, the ADL was founded primarily to combat anti-Semitism. Yes, the defense of Israel is in fact a concern of the ADL's -- but it is only one of many items on its agenda.

Beck, in fact, is clearly suggesting that anti-Semitism isn't a problem for Jews, except as it relates to Israel. (Beck has a thing about Iran that's actually a bad case of evangelical apocalypticism.) But in the USA, the problem of anti-Semitism has little if anything to do with Israel, and almost everything to do with the spread of right-wing hatemongers, who spread their poison through the very conspiracy theories and fearmongering scenarios and McCarthyite scenes that are Glenn Beck's stock in trade.

Now, let's take a look at that Tim Rutten column, especially because Beck never really did explain to his audience exactly what the piece said.

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Glenn Beck was trying real hard yesterday to convince people that his running theory -- that Barack Obama is secretly a Marxist who intends to radically transform America into a communist state -- just might be right.

He compared his theory to the early stages of the Monica-baiting of Clinton in 1998, when everyone was in denial -- because, you see, he thinks eventually he'll be proven right. OK, whatever.

Then he blurted this out:

Beck: I mean, at this point, you have to try to not pay attention. I mean, you have to be working to miss the pattern here. There's so much anti-free-market rhetoric from Obama and his top officials, you'd either have to either be living in a cave in Afghanistan next to Obama, and you can't hear anything that Ob -- uh, Osama is saying because of the goats going, ah-ah-ah, or you're so deeply in love with Obama that you can't detect a single flaw in him.

This is what we'll call a Beckean Slip: An apparent slip of the tongue that is most likely intentional, and at the bare minimum clearly exposes the desire to confuse the public.

It isn't the first time Beck has slipped and mixed up Osama bin Laden's name with President Obama's. And it certainly won't be the last.

However, it does tend to undermine Beck's subsequent claim to having this high-level, all-seeing mind that is "right" about a whole host of things (that he's actually been wrong about). Indeed, it reveals a confused mind incapable of clearly distinguishing between the president of the United States and a cave-dwelling terrorist.

Beck also adds that "I could be wrong" but "I haven't been before"? Um, yeah, except for the dozens of times he actually has been wrong. (Remember when he was predicting that Americans would eventually go for McCain at the polls? That prediction turned out well, didn't it?)

Clearly, his fans are hoping that he'll be proven right, because then they'll be justified in subsequently mounting a violent assault on the White House or something. But with a mind like Beck's concocting the theories, you might have better luck putting a bagful of cats in a roomful of word processors and hoping that Shakespeare's collected sonnets somehow emerge.

All of which raises a question that Glenn Beck should ask himself: What if you're wrong?

Because then, all you have done is smear a boatload of innocent and decent people, dragged their names through the mud, and ruined their careers.

But hey, that doesn't matter, because Glenn Beck is all about values, right? Like the value of his new mansion in Connecticut ... those are the values that matter to Glenn Beck.

Basic decency? Not so much.

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Sure, like Duncan says, Glenn Beck is a WATB. We knew that the first time he cried on-air for us.

He's also an evasive guy when confronted with his falsehoods. We saw that yesterday on The View. Whoopie Goldberg's epithet for Beck -- A Lying Sack of Dog Mess -- is a name that's going to stick, like something on the bottom of his shoe.

In fact, we now have a new acronym for him: the LSDM. We don't need to use his actual name anymore.

Oh, yeah, besides being a WATB -- check out his website's report in which he claims he was "ambushed" -- he's also seriously FOS. As when he called in sick for his own show that same afternoon, leaving us to the tender mercies of Judge Napolitano and Michelle Malkin.

Then, at the very end, he called in all plugged-up sounding and claimed he had "a case of the 24-hour swine flu". And then proceeded to once again prevaricate about the "ridiculous" interview we had all just watched that morning.

Beck: Apparently I was a liar because I said that -- which is true -- uh, that she -- I, I, Barbara Walters said hello to me, instead, it was I said hello to Barbara Walters. I walked up to her -- I guess that's we need to spend our time on for seven minutes.

In Beck's truncated version of what transpired at The View, the only reason to call him a liar was that he and Walters had different views on who said hello first. But that's BS On A Stick.

Roll the tape: You'll quickly note that the greeting disagreement started things off, but the main reason they called him a liar was that his whole story on the radio was a narrative about how you can't reserve a seat on an Amtrak train, and here these two media elites came and got reserved seats! The audacity!

But as both Walters and Goldberg explained to the LSDM, they hadn't gotten reserved seats at all. They had worked their ways back to that car after finding no seats in the front cars.

The LSDM, as is his wont, was just making stuff up. No wonder he kinda accidentally omitted that from his lamestain excuse -- it would have made it just that much lamer.

In any event, we remain indebted to Whoopie Goldberg for her masterful contribution to the Wingnut Lexicon.

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There's no other word than "dumbass" that adequately describes Arizona State University's decision not to award President Obama an honorary degree when he addresses the school's commencement today.

Sure, you can cook up lame excuses, such as that the school instead decided to name a scholarship program after him. That's nice. It's still an insult. A dumbass insult.

The Daily Show's Jason Jones visited Tempe to get some of the flavor of local sentiments. That same word kept coming to mind as we watched ASU students try to explain why Obama didn't deserve an honorary degree. My favorite:

"We're trying to be like the Cambridges, where they don't give out any, uh, honorary degrees. Make them so, uh, prestigious. To give them to, like, important people. Heads of state and stuff like that."

Runner-up:

"Wull, I've been at ASU for three or four years, and I don't have a degree yet. Why does he deserve one for being in office for 100 days?"