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Every time we run a Glenn Beck post, someone trolls into the comments and asks, "Why bother with this guy? We should just ignore him! Post more videos on [insert name of preferred progressive figure here]!"

We'd like to refer them to this week's special report from the ADL on the rise of populist anti-government rage, the one that officially dubbed Beck our national "Fearmonger in Chief".

Keith Olbermann invited Arianna Huffington onto Countdown to discuss the report last night:

OLBERMANN: It would be nice to think of Glenn Beck just as a joke, as fodder for this show and the “Daily Show” and others that point out how stupid some of this stuff is. But this report, you know, suggests something else, this is—fearmonger-in-chief term is frightening.

HUFFINGTON: It is frightening. Well, I would say the fearmonger-in-chief title should still be reserved for Dick Cheney, even in retirement. But barring that, there is something that we need to really pay attention to with Glenn Beck. We cannot just dismiss him. Because the truth of the matter is that there is a good reason why we have an exemption to the free speech protection by the first amendment when we say you cannot shout fire in a crowded theater.

And he's doing that every night. He's basically using images of violence to bring together with all that he's accusing the Obama administration of, which varies from racism to communism, Nazism and everything else in between. So, all that has definitely an impact. I believe words matter, language matters and he's using it in incredibly irresponsible ways night after night.

OLBERMANN: What do you say to the argument that this country has always self corrected, that whether Father Coughlin on the radio in the ‘30s or Bo Carter (ph) who was a newscaster who presented literally stuff that was made up on the hour in CBS News in the ‘30s or the columnist Westbook Pegler or Senator Joe McCarthy? All these people a finale in which they exited the stage and suddenly. What is to say that that‘s not going to happen here?

HUFFINGTON: Well, I hope it's going to happen, but it's not going to happen without people pointing out what Glenn Beck is doing.

Indeed, since the report was issued, Beck seems to have turned up the Wingnuttery Dial all the way 11.

We put together a compendium of Beck's finest fearmongering of just the past year on Fox, inspired largely by the instances cited by the ADL -- with a few of our own favorite moments thrown in for good measure.

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As Arianna says, confronting the Becks is vital to keeping our discourse healthy -- because he is polluting it daily with the toxic garbage of disinformation, paranoia, and scapegoating.

We discussed this recently in the matter of Lou Dobbs:

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Media Matters points out how conservative commentators such as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Michael Savage like to use rape metaphors when discussing progressives or progressive policies.

Right-wing media are very quick to claim progressives are "raping" Americans:

Beck: "People in New York, you're being raped by your government -- raped." On his November 19 radio show, Beck stated:

BECK: When the people lead, the leaders will follow. And we're building life boats, because, right now, you know it to be true -- and I'm hearing it in New York. People in New York, you're being raped by your government -- raped. California, how are you doing it, man? They just took an extra 10 percent withholdings from you, as a forced noninterest loan. Get the hell off my land. My gosh, how are you doing it?

Well, I'm seeing it in New York. People are just starting to see now what has been done to them in the last six months here in New York. And they're starting to look at it and say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. What the hell -- look at how all of this is adding up?" Well, that's what's going to happen as a collective in this country. I don't how long it's gonna take. It may take three months, six months, a year -- I can't imagine.

Beck: "We're the young girl saying 'No, no, help me,' and the government is Roman Polanski." Discussing health care reform on the November 16 edition of his Fox News program, Beck stated:

BECK: America has spoken clearly, consistently. We don't want this. And for the first time in history, we don't think it's the government's place to give it to us. ... We are -- excuse this analogy, but I feel like it's true -- we're the young girl saying "No, no, help me," and the government is Roman Polanski. In the end, I think we're all going to be cowering in France.

Beck: Health care reform is "good old socialism ... raping the pocketbooks of the rich to give to the poor." On his July 21 Fox News program, Beck stated:

BECK: President Obama has his massive $1.5 trillion health care plan. It's hogging up the news cycle. The Republicans and, you know, a lot of people are starting to say, "Isn't this socialist, here? I mea, this is pretty crazy." The answer to me on that one is really easy: Yep, it's good old socialism -- you know, pretty much raping the pocketbooks of the rich to give to the poor. I think that's socialism.

Limbaugh: Obama ordered his "pay czar" to "rape" bailed out executives. On his October 22 broadcast, talking about Kenneth Feinberg, who was appointed to oversee executive compensation at financial firms that were still holding funds authorized under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, Limbaugh stated:

LIMBAUGH: I think everything about this story, this "pay czar," is blockbuster. It is -- I mean, it's late-night comedy gold. Everything about the story is a lie. ... Every detail about this story has to be a lie. I refuse to believe that Obama didn't know what Feinberg was doing. In fact, the truth probably is Feinberg's following orders. Feinberg is following orders and I guaran-damn-tee you Obama said: "You get up there and you rape 'em. And you make 'em poor. And you make 'em pay. And you let 'em know. Just don't tell 'em that I knew anything about it."

Limbaugh: "Get ready to get gang-raped again, folks." Discussing health care reform on his June 29 broadcast, Limbaugh stated:

LIMBAUGH: Well, isn't this good? Get ready to get gang-raped again, folks. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she will not give the public a week to review the final text of a health care reform bill before it's voted on later this year. And Harry Reid has also declined to commit to giving the public a week to read and consider the final health care bill, despite Obama promising that all legislation would be up for five days on one of his stupid websites where everybody could read it.

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Glenn Beck, yesterday on his Fox News show:

Beck: I'm sure that's fine. Teaching Saul Alinsky, that's fine. It's all academia -- you know, he doesn't agree with that. Good!

Then all the things I talked about are nonsense and I'll go down in the history books as a complete nutjob that was totally wrong. And I'm perfectly fine -- perfectly fine being remembered by that in history. I hope to be wrong.

Considering that this comes amid a rant in which he falsely claims that John Holdren wants "forced abortions" and that Obama was secretly teaching Alinsky to his students, and then rants:

They need to fear you -- and oh, they will soon.

Well, one can only conclude he's already there.

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Back when Bill O'Reilly was semi-defending Lou Dobbs for promoting the "birther" conspiracy theories, he invited on Richard Cohen of the Southern Poverty Law Center -- which had called for Dobbs' firing -- to defend their campaign. And he made a bet with Cohen, kinda sorta:

O'Reilly: CNN is never going to fire him, you know that ...

Cohen: I'm not quite as cynical as you are, Bill. I think that if enough people speak out, CNN will listen and be more responsible in the future.

O'Reilly: You wanna bet? ... I've got ten grand for Habitat for Humanity on the table if you wanna bet me.

Cohen: How about ten grand for the Southern Poverty Law Center?

O'Reilly: But I’m not going to take your money. There’s no real bet there — he’s not going to get fired.

Of course, Dobbs was indeed fired. So last night on The O'Reilly Factor, he announced:

O'Reilly: I will pay that debt. I will donate $10,000 to Habitat for Humanity -- I don't know whether the Southern Poverty Law Center was responsible, but I'm gonna do it anyway.

But he still just didn't want to come to terms with the reality that Dobbs' firing was not about First Amendment free-speech rights, but about the responsibilities that come with those rights -- that is, it was about the role that Big Media play in a functioning democracy, and the civic necessities that lie therein.

Cohen: Bill, I don't think it was just us. It was a lot of people -- our supporters, our allies --

O'Reilly: But tell me what you did, because you were obviously involved. What did you do?

Cohen: Well, Bill, what we tried to do was point out the kind of lies and racist conspiracy theories that Dobbs propagated night after night on his show.

O'Reilly: How did you do that, though? Talk to people over there? Did you do a letter-writing campaign? Did you go to their house? What did you do?

Cohen: Well, the first thing that we did was we tried to talk to Dobbs, talk to his staff. And do that quietly, to try to get our point across. When that failed, we wrote to CNN and asked them to correct some of the crazy things that he said. Finally, this summer, we asked CNN to remove him from the air when he started giving credence to those crazy bogus theories, as you called them, about Obama's citizenship. So I think it was a combination of those things.

O'Reilly: But what I'm interested to know -- Look, anybody can ask, they ask Fox to remove me from the air every hour on the hour, OK? So anybody can ask. Aw, we don't like O'Reilly, we don't like Dobbs, get 'em off the air. But did you have a feeling CNN was actually listening to you? Or that they were gonna pull him off the air? You've gotta give me a little inside baseball here, Mr. Cohen.

Cohen: We had no secret pipeline to CNN, Bill. And you know, the truth of the matter is, you played an important role in the campaign. I appreciate your having me on in July, and I appreciate your acknowledging on the air to your viewers that the things that Dobbs was saying about the birthers were bogus and absurd --

O'Reilly: Well, some of them were bogus, but here's where we differ. And everybody should know it, Mr. Cohen. I don't want Lou Dobbs off the air. I think he's a voice that should be heard. You want him off the air. See look -- I feel that you, and your organization, while you do do some good, are fascist in your approach to people with whom you disagree. Because Lou Dobbs shouldn't have been pulled off their for his opinion -- challenged, yes. I disagree, I say it! Pulled off the air? No! You shouldn't even want that. You should want, in a democracy, people to have freedom of speech and put stuff out there. If you disagree, or you think that he's inaccurate, get -- that's why I give you airtime! You're welcome to come on, and say look, this is what we do, that's what we do here!

Of course, no one is infringing on Lou Dobbs' free-speech rights, because having a network-TV show is not a right guaranteed by the First Amendment. No one is preventing Dobbs from enjoying the same speech rights enjoyed by everyone else in the country. What they are insisting upon, instead, is that the people in charge of dispensing mass information to the public uphold the responsibilities inherent in holding a powerful position in setting the direction of our democratic discourse.

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Glenn Beck has apparently decided he doesn't care how big a public nutcase he is making himself into. Because, you know, the black helicopters are coming!!!!!! And he's just the guy to get the warning out.

Back when he started his Fox show in January, I wondered how long it would take Beck to become an outright Patriot conspiracy-monger -- especially because he dabbled in it early on, and it's been building ever since. I knew we had to be getting close when Beck's buddy Chuck Norris went full-bore militia earlier this week.

So the answer is: about ten and a half months. Because yesterday on his show, he just threw the chips all in and went for your classic militia black-helicopter conspiracy theory:

Beck: On the scale of insane things, I want to show what we skipped past. Ready? Look at this. Put it up here. We're in a recession now. People argue over whether we're even in a recession! We're in a deep recession. I think we're on the edge of a depression because of what we're doing.

OK, so, we have skipped a deep recession and skipped depression -- even the Great Depression -- we went right to the collapse of the dollar. Then he went right to global currency. One world government! And a New World Order! [Slaps] Like that!

That certainly is an interesting "scale of insane things," isn't it? Especially considering how insane you have to be to believe we've actually progressed beyond "recession." Insane, indeed.

Anyway, Beck then brings on the capital-investment adviser who sent Beck completely around the bend with his snippet on CNBC speculating that the ultimate solution to the economy would be "global government": Damon Vickers of Nine Points Capital Partners. Vickers is a longtime nutcase who in fact was coming fresh off the Alex Jones show earlier this week, expounding on this same theory. (Fun note: A year ago, Vickers predicted Microsoft was "going nowhere but down." That was when its stock price was at 13. Now it's above 30.)

There's a reason the ADL officially dubbed Beck our national "Fearmonger in Chief" this week. And there's a reason militias are springing up like mushrooms everywhere.

And the reason is that Glenn Beck has a national TV network show on which he is not only permitted but encouraged to promote complete wingnuttery whose sole purpose is to make Americans fearful, paranoid and angry.

I put together a compendium of Beck's finest fearmongering of just the past year on Fox, inspired largely by the instances cited by the ADL -- with a few of our own favorite moments thrown in for good measure.

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It's nice to know that we're not alone in raising concerns about the increasingly unhinged nature of the kind of rhetoric right-wing talkers are unleashing in the name of their jihad against President Obama -- in no small part because such rhetoric inevitably produces acts of horrific violence.

Yesterday, the Anti-Defamation League confirmed that these concerns are anything but groundless, with a devastating report titled "Rage Grows in America: Anti‑Government Conspiracies":

Since the election of Barack Obama as president, a current of anti-government hostility has swept across the United States, creating a climate of fervor and activism with manifestations ranging from incivility in public forums to acts of intimidation and violence.

What characterizes this anti-government hostility is a shared belief that Obama and his administration actually pose a threat to the future of the United States. Some accuse Obama of plotting to bring socialism to the United States, while others claim he will bring about Nazism or fascism. All believe that Obama and his administration will trample on individual freedoms and civil liberties, due to some sinister agenda, and they see his economic and social policies as manifestations of this agenda. In particular anti-government activists used the issue of health care reform as a rallying point, accusing Obama and his administration of dark designs ranging from “socialized medicine” to “death panels,” even when the Obama administration had not come out with a specific health care reform plan. Some even compared the Obama administration’s intentions to Nazi eugenics programs.

Some of these assertions are motivated by prejudice, but more common is an intense strain of anti-government distrust and anger, colored by a streak of paranoia and belief in conspiracies. These sentiments are present both in mainstream and “grass-roots” movements as well as in extreme anti-government movements such as a resurgent militia movement. Ultimately, this anti-government anger, if it continues to grow in intensity and scope, may result in an increase in anti-government extremists and the potential for a rise of violent anti-government acts.

Just as we have frequently remarked here, this rage is being fed to a remarkable extent by mainstream media pundits on the right, particularly Glenn Beck, who has a long history of promoting extremist ideas and rhetoric:

Though much of the impetus for anti-government sentiment has come from a variety of grass-roots and extremist groups, segments of the mainstream media have played a surprisingly active role in generating such segment. Though a number of media figures and commentators have taken part, the media personality who has played the most active role has been radio and television host Glenn Beck, who along with many of his guests have made a habit of demonizing the Obama administration and promoting conspiracy theories about it. Beck has acted as a “fearmonger-in-chief,” raising anxiety about and distrust towards the government.

It devotes a whole section to exploring this:

The most important mainstream media figure who has repeatedly helped to stoke the fires of anti-government anger is right-wing media host Glenn Beck, who has a TV show on FOX News and a popular syndicated radio show. While other conservative media hosts, such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, routinely attack Obama and his administration, typically on partisan grounds, they have usually dismissed or refused to give a platform to the conspiracy theorists and anti-government extremists. This has not been the case with Glenn Beck. Beck and his guests have made a habit of demonizing President Obama and promoting conspiracy theories about his administration.

On a number of his TV and radio programs, Beck has even gone so far as to make comparisons between Hitler and Obama and to promote the idea that the president is dangerous.

The ADL report was issued that same day as Sam Stein's devastating examination of the extremists Beck has historically promoted on his programs:

The Huffington Post took a look some of the bombastic host's past guests and found names steeped in controversy. Beck has hosted, and even occasionally praised, a renowned white supremacist, a devout southern secessionist, a defender of slavery, and a 9/11 skeptic.

... If Beck were a self-avowed journalist -- which he's not -- these guests could be chalked up as an effort to foster intriguing debate, whether about immigration policy, constitutional principles or the strength of the dollar. But, taken as a whole, the roster reflects the host's partiality to an ideology that is far-right if not outright extremist.

Of course, this is a subject C&L readers are well familiar with. But the evidence keeps piling up: Glenn Beck is perhaps the foremost conduit for extremist belief systems and ideas to infect our mainstream conservative in the history of the mass media.

And he's just getting started. God only knows to what effect.

Steve Benen:

I checked the byline a couple of times this morning, to make sure the column that was ostensibly written by David Broder wasn't, in fact, written by Charles Krauthammer. Regrettably, the so-called Dean of the D.C. Media Establishment actually wrote this.

The more President Obama examines our options in Afghanistan, the less he likes the choices he sees. But, as the old saying goes, to govern is to choose -- and he has stretched the internal debate to the breaking point.

It is evident from the length of this deliberative process and from the flood of leaks that have emerged from Kabul and Washington that the perfect course of action does not exist. Given that reality, the urgent necessity is to make a decision -- whether or not it is right.

"Whether or not it is right." The Commander in Chief, in other words, should put expediency over merit. Speed is preferable to accuracy. It's only the longest military conflict in American history, with the future of U.S. foreign policy on the line -- the president should worry less about due diligence and thoughtful analysis, and worry more about picking a course, even if it's wrong. Other than the loss of American servicemen and women, untold billions of dollars, and undermining U.S. interests in a critical region, what's the worst that can happen?

This says so much to me. The "dean" of Beltway journalism and conventional thinking perfectly encapsulates the Republican zeitgeist:

1. Criticize anything that Obama does. If he acts decisively, complain that he's reckless. If he acts thoughtfully, complain that he's "dithering". If he points out that he's inherited a big fat clusterf&ck, complain that he's pointing fingers. If he tries to move forward in even a slightly progressive way, complain that he's not bipartisan enough and that he should listen to Republicans. In short, make sure that no matter what, Obama is wrong.
2. There are no consequences to telling Obama he's wrong. So what if 45,000 people die because they don't have healthcare? So what if sending more troops is basically sending them to their deaths? So what if there is no stable government in Afghanistan? So what if we're spending millions of dollars every month and deficit spending is the cause du jour for those suddenly fiscally responsible Republicans?

If Obama acts quickly, and it's the wrong choice, will the decision to act fall back on Broder and the Republicans for the pressure they've placed on Obama? 'Course not. But you can bet your sweet bippy they'll only be too glad to pounce on him if there are more American deaths.

Tell you what, Broder, if you're so eager to see some action in Afghanistan, let's see you do one of your patented "folksy" reports from a coffee shop in Kandahar or Kabul. Otherwise, STFU and let the people in charge actually make a reasoned and thoughtful decision, since it affects so much in American blood and treasure.

We've had eight years of quick rather than right decisions. It's time for the grownups to be in charge now.

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Fresh off warning us that President Obama intends to create a "one world order," Chuck Norris went on Sean Hannity's show last night on Fox and described his eliminationist fantasies if he ran for office:

Hannity: Why don't you run? No no no, there's a solution -- why wouldn't you -- Chuck Norris could be governor of Texas one day.

Norris: You know why? Because I'd be sitting here with my opponent, and debating, and then he would start attacking my character, and I'd jump over there and choke him unconscious.

[Laughter]

Hannity: You have more control than that!

Norris: I don't! That's the problem, you know. I have a thin skin. It was really tough in the film world. And in the political world, you know, I'd be killing half the people.

Because, you know, nothing bespeaks personal character like the volatile use of violence on your opponents.

He goes on to explain why he wouldn't fit well in political arenas like the Senate:

Norris: You know, with all the senators, you can't get anything done. You know, it's always right and left --

Hannity: No, no, you can, I disagree with you. You can.

Norris: Well, what I'd have to do, I'd have to choke out all the Democrats.

Hannity: [laughs] Well, it's a good start.

He also describes one of the eliminationist "jokes" in his new book:

Norris: One of the "facts" there [in his book] is America is not a democracy, it's a Chucktatership. And if it was, I said I would go to Congress, I'd line up every member of Congress, and I'd have Ron Paul, who I believe is one of the, probably one of the more honest ones there, I'd say, 'Ron, point out the honest ones' --

Hannity: I like Ron Paul. He's nuts.

Norris: Yeah, I know. That's why I like him. But anyway, I'd choke out the dis -- every dishonest politician that's up there.

Evidently, that would perforce include "all the Democrats." And any non-Paulbot Republicans. Which is most of them.

Well, paranoia and eliminationist violence often go hand in hand. And eventually, for the paranoid, the violence ceases to be a mere fantasy.

You know, you have to appreciate that guys like Anthony Weiner and Joe Sestak will go on Bill O'Reilly's show to try to bravely counter his nonstop deluge of right-wing talking points. But as he demonstrated last night when he had them on to talk about the New York City terrorism trials, he just proved once again why it's never a winning proposition to go on his show, no matter how hard you try.

O'Reilly only invites liberals on to set them up for a shoutdown, really -- and that's what he did last night. Both Weiner and Sestak pointed out the absurdity of O'Reilly's fears about the civil court system setting the terrorists free -- and worse still, in O'Reilly's view, actually being permitted to stand up and voice their beliefs as part of their defense.

O'Reilly just wound up shouting at them about the four-year trial of Zacarias Moussaoui -- who in fact was convicted. But to O'Reilly, what was intolerable was that Moussaoui was able to use the trial as "propaganda" for radical Islam.

O'Reilly just doesn't believe in the American way of justice, and is afraid to let the world see our justice. Fortunately, many more of us are not so cowardly.

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It is hard to explain to white people like Glenn Beck why their "innocent" questions about race actually just reveal their ignorance and their false assumptions about people of other races and the nature of race relations.

But Beck is so blitheringly un-self-aware that he decided to give it a go anyway yesterday on his Fox News show. As you might expect, it was a serial embarrassment.

Beck, you see, was careful to hand-select his audience, people "the media claim don't think exist" -- black conservatives! Not that he ever actually explains this to the viewing audience -- you have to figure that out for yourselves as the show goes along, like the moment when he asks the audience if they think we're headed toward socialism (they all raise their hands) or are accused of being not "black enough" if they are conservative (again, a unanimous show of hands).

And it let Beck lead exchanges like this, with Beck regular Charles Payne and talk-show host Lisa Fritsch:

Beck: How many people here identify themselves as African Americans? (About a third raise their hands) OK -- Why?

Payne: It's interchangeable.

Beck: But wait, wait. Why not identify yourself as Americans?

Fritsch: Well, people can look at you and tell you're black. You can't escape that.

Beck: Yeah, but I don't identify myself as white, or a white American.

Will Brown of the New York Republican Community Coalition points out, adroitly, that "African American" is an "evolution" from the "N word" -- and certainly is preferable. Moreover, it wasn't black people who invented the "N word" or the segregation from enjoying the full fruits of American citizenship it represented -- it was white people. "African American" represents the recognition of their dignity and their rights as Americans.

But this point sails right over Beck's head, because he's too ignorant to appreciate the implications. Had Beck even a smidgen of American history, particularly pertaining to civil rights, he'd know that white Americans for most of the decades of the past century used the word "American" and "real American" almost exclusively to refer to white people -- and that this motif lingers even today (see, e.g., Sarah Palin's references to "real Americans" during the campaign -- speaking before small-town, all-white audiences).

This historical and cultural ignorance just kept manifesting itself:

Beck: Because one of the problems that I have -- and I have to tell you, as a white guy, as a white guy, I'm just being real honest with you, as a white guy, I think white people are uncomfortable sometimes saying, 'You know what, Martin Luther King' -- and then quoting Martin Luther King, because, it's almost as if society says -- 'No no no! That's our guy! Not your guy!' And it shouldn't be that way. And so Martin Luther King, wasn't the dream that we're all judged by the content of our character?

Beck doesn't understand why it's idiotic of white people to quote King -- namely, King was speaking in defense of black people whose civil rights had been systematically and violently denied for over a century, and his words were spoken in that context. They weren't intended to be spoken in defense of advantaged white people who want an excuse to keep stereotyping black people.

The black conservative talkers he had on weren't a whole lot better. Perhaps the most outrageously ahistorical remark came from Fritsch:

Fritsch: The only way black people were ever able to triumph is because of conservative values, which is directly linked to Christianity. Had we been liberals, during the Civil Rights movement, nobody would have done anything!

Um, Ms. Fritsch, you need to avail yourself some history books too. It was conservatives who argued for maintaining slavery before the Civil War. It was conservatives who insisted after the war that blacks be denied the full rights of citizenship, and who erected the system of Jim Crow, who led rope-bearing lynch mobs that crucified thousands of black people. It was conservatives who erected "No Black After Sundown" signs at the city borders of thousands of American towns.

And most of all, it was conservatives who fought the Civil Rights movement tooth and nail. And it was only from the ceaseless efforts of liberals -- many of them indeed Christian liberals -- in opposition to conservatives, many of them Christian conservatives -- that anything was in fact achieved during that era. Somehow, you've managed to get your history completely upside down.

This idiocy reached its apotheosis, though, when Beck played for his audience that audio tape of black Detroiters turning out for welfare assistance funds, originally promoted by Rush Limbaugh, which was nothing more than a nakedly racist bit of ugly stereotyping on the part of the radio talker, Ken Rogulski, who produced it. As King Crimson observed:

The conservo-talk reporter cherry picked through the audio booty until he found the absolute best soundbite that would most perfectly frame the city as one filled with Obama-fawning morons, black Sambos, and greedy welfare grabbers - precisely, as Limbaugh would later argue, the kind of rank idiots who would vote for someone like America's first black president.

And if you listen to the woman making the "Obama money" remarks, you can hear that she's cracking humorously on the humorless, stereotype-dependent white guy asking. He -- and Beck and Limbaugh, by extension -- are the butt of the joke and they don't even know it.

Well, we actually know where Beck thinks this talk comes from:

Beck: All right. These are the people who have been abused by the system. They've been taught they needed the government. They've been taught to be slaves, and their master is Washington! Both parties!

For some reason, those weren't the words he used yesterday. Hmmm. Wonder why not, don't you?

This is just vintage Beck, gorging himself on dumbass white stereotypes of black people and then fobbing himself off as just a colorblind white guy. As we noted before, this is his way of race-baiting:

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The meme had been brewing for a few days among some of the Fox News guests -- particularly Michelle Malkin -- brought on to talk about the Fort Hood shootings, but it was Bill Sammon, during the broadcast of the memorial for the slain soldiers, who apparently made it official at Fox: The Fort Hood shootings were a terrorist attack -- comparable to 9/11 and Oklahoma City -- by a radical Islamist engaged in Muslim "jihad."

Now, it's not only the conventional wisdom at Fox News, it's one of their major attack points -- they're claiming that because President Obama and the rest of the media aren't adopting their presumptuous and hysterical meme, they're being "soft" on terrorism.

The meme gained momentum when Glenn picked up Sammon's ball and ran with it the next day, declaring: "If you don't call [Hasan] a terrorist, it clears a path for ... an extremist terrorist plan." That night, Sean Hannity explored the question at length with Michelle Malkin, as you can see from the video atop this post.

For Malkin and Hannity, "political correctness" -- which they blame for the military's failure to stop Hasan -- is actually code for "the refusal to engage in ethnic and religious profiling". Because such profiling, it's clear, is what they think the military (and the government generally) should do to prevent future such shootings.

The worst offender, though, has been Bill O'Reilly, who -- as you can see below -- not only harangued Sally Quinn for her reluctance to declare Nidal Hasan a "terrorist," but then devoted his leadoff Talking Points Memo segment last night to chastising the president and the rest of the media for their reluctance to embrace the meme.

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This exchange with Quinn was especially revealing:

O'Reilly: But you have a hard time saying the words "Muslim terrorist," and so does Obama. He has a hard time saying it. I don't know why you guys aren't saying it. You know, why, why?

Quinn: Well, I think, first of all, there are different kinds of terrorists. As I said, Timothy McVeigh --

O'Reilly: He's a Muslim terrorist! What do you mean, different kinds of terrorist? He killed people under the banner of jihad! That's who he is! What do you -- look, what do you want, him to come to your house with a strap-on bomb? The guy did it for jihadist reasons! "Allah Akbar!" That's the slogan! He mails Al Qaeda! Miss Quinn, you're a brilliant woman, and I'm not saying that facetiously. You are. A third-grader gets this, and you're resisting it! I wanna know why!

Quinn: Bill, you're making a very good case. I mean, he's Muslim, and he may well end up being a terrorist. We don't know for sure --

O'Reilly: I know for sure! Ninety percent of the people watching me know for sure! I don't know why you don't know for sure! What else do you need?

Quinn: I mean, you can call the guy who blew up -- you know, who shot up the Holocaust Museum a terrorist --

O'Reilly: Did he yell "Allah Akbar?" If he yelled "Allah Akbar," and he e-mailed Al Qaeda in Yemen, I'd call him that, Miss Quinn!

Quinn: OK, he's a Muslim terrorist.

O'Reilly: Thank you.

O'Reilly seems to have a peculiar idea of what constitutes "terrorism." His definition of the word seems to be "any act of violence by devout Muslims", or something along those lines.

That, of course, is quite a distance from the the legal definition of terrorism (from U.S. Code Title 22, Ch.38, Para. 2656f(d)):

(2) the term “terrorism” means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents;

This term, in fact, perfectly describes Holocaust Museum shooter James Von Brunn, who was, beyond any serious doubt, a classic right-wing "lone wolf" terrorist.

It is in fact still not clear, however, whether the description fits Nidal Hasan's motives in shooting 13 people to death. It is true that all kinds of evidence is emerging showing that Hasan was increasingly becoming politically radicalized.

What that evidence doesn't establish, though, is that he engaged in this horrendous act on behalf of those radical beliefs, or whether those beliefs simply formed part of the context in which he acted. There certainly haven't been any organizational ties established. We probably won't have any idea until Hasan himself starts talking, or at least his attorneys begin preparing his defense.

It's important to remember what mass-murder profiler Pat Brown told Fox's Brian Kilmeade:

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Jon Stewart was on fire last night. First he had his response to Sean Hannity's lame "apology" after being totally busted by Stewart for fraudulent reportage. The upshot: Getting Hannity to apologize wasn't worth the ordeal of actually having to watch his show.

He also credits the show's young assistant producer, a fellow named Ramin, for catching this bit of fraud, so he brings Ramin out for a kudo. Let's just say that your humble editor, whose job it is to monitor Fox closely for C&L readers, relates.

And then there was his report on Lou Dobbs' departure from CNN:

Busted! Jon Stewart notices that Sean Hannity, in "reporting" on Michele Bachmann's teabagger anti-health-care rally last week, showed his audience footage from Glenn Beck's "912 Project" project of the month before, in order to make it look like there were big crowds out for it.

My question: Why aren't any journalists actually discussing the complete and utter travesty of "journalistic standards" as practiced by Fox News?

And why don't those Villagers who tut-tut the White House for standing up to the nonstop onslaught from Fox ever talk about this kind of crap? It's a constant, everyday occurrence at Fox.

Don't journalists care about their reputations anymore? Because Fox sullies the name of everyone who calls him- or herself a journalist.

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Glenn Beck -- who of course has a fetish about "extremist radicals" supposedly infiltrating the White House, while himself promoting far-right extremism on his show on a regular basis -- has been regularly plumping far-right "constitutionalist" theories about the 10th Amendment and states' rights for awhile now, including that hourlong segment complete with 1990s militia figures.

Mostly, though, Beck has been somewhat restrained about just how far down this path he would go, eschewing some of the more radical ideas that are part and parcel of this belief system, or at least declining to mention them to his audiences. But yesterday, filling in for the appendicitis-stricken Beck, Judge Andrew Napolitano opened the constitutionalist Pandora's Box wide and loosed all its ugly demons.

He opened the Beck program with a long rant in which he began (as is typical with "constitutionalists") with utterly false premises -- namely, that not only would the Obama "public option" health-care plan completely take over our health-care system, but the plan could put you in jail for failure to buy insurance. And from there, he sprang into advocating the repeal of the federal income tax and the "nullification" of federal laws by the states:

Napolitano: Last Saturday, at 11 o’clock in the evening, the House of Representatives voted by a five-vote margin to have the federal government manage the health care of every American at a cost of $1 trillion dollars over the next ten years.

For the first time in American history, if this bill becomes law, the Feds will force you to buy insurance you might not want, or may not need, or cannot afford. If you don’t purchase what the government tells you to buy, if you don’t do so when they tell you to do it, and if you don’t buy just what they say is right for you, the government may fine you, prosecute you, and even put you in jail. Freedom of choice and control over your own body will be lost. The privacy of your communications and medical decision making with your physician will be gone. More of your hard earned dollars will be at the disposal of federal bureaucrats.

It was not supposed to be this way. We elect the government. It works for us. How did it get so removed, so unbridled, so arrogant that it can tell us how to live our personal lives? Evil rarely comes upon us all at once, and liberty is rarely lost in one stroke. It happens gradually, over the years and decades and even centuries. A little stretch here, a cave in there, powers are slowly taken from the states and the people and before you know it, we have one big monster government that recognizes no restraint on its ability to tell us how to live. It claims the power to regulate any activity, tax any behavior, and demand conformity to any standard it chooses.

The Founders did not give us a government like the one we have today. The government they gave us was strictly limited in its scope, guaranteed individual liberty, preserved the free market, and on matters that pertain to our private behavior was supposed to leave us alone.

In the Constitution, the Founders built in checks and balances. If the Congress got out of hand, the states would restrain it. If the states stole liberty or property, the Congress would cure it. If the President tried to become a king, the courts would prevent it.

In the next few weeks, I will be giving a public class on Constitutional Law here on the Fox News Channel, on the Fox Business Network, on Foxnews.com, and on Fox Nation. In anticipation of that, many of you have asked: What can we do now about the loss of freedom?

For starters, we can vote the bums out of their cushy federal offices! We can persuade our state governments to defy the Feds in areas like health care -- where the Constitution gives the Feds zero authority. We can petition our state legislatures to threaten to amend the Constitution to abolish the income tax, return the selection of U.S. senators to state legislatures and nullify all the laws the Congress has written that are not based in the Constitution.

One thing we can’t do is just sit back and take it.

I can't tell you how bizarre it is to see arguments I used to hear coming from the mouths of Montana Freemen like LeRoy Schweitzer in the 1990s -- arguments that led to him embarking on an 81-day armed standoff with federal authorities, and resulting in him spending the rest of his natural life in a federal prison -- coming from supposedly mainstream talk-show hosts on Fox News only 13 years later.

Chip Berlet at PublicEye has a decent rundown of the roots of these "constitutionalist" beliefs:

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Yesterday, during the Fox News broadcast of the memorial service for the victims at Fort Hood, Fox contributor Bill Sammon took this the next step: He began openly referring to the Fort Hood case as a "terrorist attack" and actually compared it to Oklahoma City and 9/11:

Sammon: I think it's really going to be key to see the tone and tenor of the Commander in Chief when he addresses this crowd. Because it's actually a very important moment in his presidency.

Think about this. This is the first time that he's going to be responding in a major way to, really the first major act of terrorism against the United States on our soil. And there's some similarities and some analogies to when President Clinton addressed the nation after Oklahoma City, to when George W. Bush went to address the nation from Ground Zero -- both of those times, just like this, were early on in the presidencies, and really, in those earlier two examples, to some extent, they were, uh, forums in which the presidents sort of found their voices, especially if you think about Ground Zero, where President Bush had trouble sort of presenting a real strong, uh, public face for the first couple of days, and then he went to Ground Zero and said, 'I can hear you, and pretty soon the people here are going to hear from all of us.'

So it's an important moment when a president addresses the nation in the wake of a terrorist act against U.S. interests.

Throughout the day Fox was running a logo calling the event "Attack on Fort Hood," and featuring investigative reports suggesting that the shooter, Nidal Hasan, was acting at the bidding of radical imams -- even though none of the evidence so far actually concretely shows that Hasan was acting as an Islamic terrorist.

Indeed, most of the evidence so far seems to indicate this was a militarized case of "going postal" -- which is always a horrific thing, but lacks the political/ideological component that always defines real acts of terrorism.

President Obama, in fact, has been urging the public not to leap to unwarranted conclusions about the shooter's motives. Looks like Fox News and Bill Sammon have decided to just ignore that advice. After all, they have an agenda to push.