I will be celebrating (mourning?) my twentieth year since coming to work in Washington next year. I came here with the Clinton team, and even though I was President Clinton’s liaison to the progressive community, I still came to town with a bunch of moderate Democrats. Given my banging away on so many topics in my blog posts, I do get asked from time to time whether I have moved to “the left” over the years. The answer is absolutely not. I still believe virtually the same things about politics and the economy I believed a couple of decades ago, including:

1. That the America I grew up in during the 1960s and ’70s, which had a broad and prosperous middle class and a sturdy safety net for those down on their luck or too old to work, was a great country to live in for most Americans, but that the middle class had been squeezed right and left by big corporate interests and the conservative movement.

2. That the growing extremist conservative movement, which had taken over the Republican Party, blindly worshiped the free market along with the wealthiest and most powerful among us, and was determined to roll back social progress of all kinds.

3. That the Democratic Party was deeply flawed because too many Democrats were not willing to fight for progressive policies that would help the middle class and poor, but that they sure were better than the scary extremists who controlled the Republican Party.

4. That party politics alone would never win the progress we needed; that we need a strong progressive movement to fight the good fight.

5. That the New Deal and Great Society policy victories of the 1930s through the early ’70s were what moved this country forward more than any other set of policies. Social Security and Medicare gave senior citizens a measure of economic security they never had before. Labor unions were able to grow and expand, ensuring that middle-class incomes would rise, and that more working class people would get a secure foothold in that middle class. Banks were strongly regulated and kept to a reasonable size, ensuring that the financial crises that periodically wracked the country’s economy in the decades before and after those years didn’t happen. The minimum wage, the end of child labor, OSHA, and the 40-hour work week ensured more dignity and safety on the job. A wave of school building, the GI Bill, Pell Grants, the development of community colleges, and other educational initiatives meant that more Americans got good educations than ever in history. Civil rights, voting rights, and new anti-discrimination laws for women meant far more fairness and equality of opportunity for all Americans. Unemployment compensation, Medicaid, school lunch programs, food stamps, Head Start, and legal services meant that even low-income Americans had a modest amount of financial security in the hard times. The Clean Air, Clean Water, and Superfund acts made our environment far cleaner for all citizens. All of these new policies helped create the wealthiest economy, and most prosperous middle class in world history, and that our goal in politics should be to build on that success rather than tear it down.

I believed all that the day I moved to Washington to be part of the Clinton administration, and I believe it still, so I don’t feel like I have moved to the left at all. I feel very certain that I am solidly within the mainstream of the Democratic Party and progressive thought in America.

But I do think something important has changed. The corporate stranglehold on our media, government, and ideological parameters has shifted, and the Bob Rubin wing of the Democratic Party has grown steadily stronger.

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Yes, we used to joke (or half-joke, anyway) that hey, next thing you know, Republicans are going to start demanding a return legalized child labor.

It's not a joke anymore.

As Ian Millhiser reports at Think Progress, Utah's newly elected Republican Senator, Mike Lee -- the Tea Partier who unseated Robert Bennett -- posted a video of a lecture he gave last week on the Constitution. It was quite a lecture: Not only does Lee reveal himself to be a far-right "Tenther" -- a conspiracist approach to the Constitution borne out of the Patriot/militia movement of the 1990s -- but as someone who believes child-labor laws are unconstitutional, too:

Congress decided it wanted to prohibit [child labor], so it passed a law—no more child labor. The Supreme Court heard a challenge to that and the Supreme Court decided a case in 1918 called Hammer v. Dagenhardt. In that case, the Supreme Court acknowledged something very interesting — that, as reprehensible as child labor is, and as much as it ought to be abandoned — that’s something that has to be done by state legislators, not by Members of Congress. [...]

This may sound harsh, but it was designed to be that way. It was designed to be a little bit harsh. Not because we like harshness for the sake of harshness, but because we like a clean division of power, so that everybody understands whose job it is to regulate what.

Now, we got rid of child labor, notwithstanding this case. So the entire world did not implode as a result of that ruling.

Millhiser explains just how misbegotten this argument is -- particularly since the Supreme Court, in overturning the rulings that enabled child labor in the first place, was unanimous about the right of the federal government to be involved in these matters.

But as Steve Benen adroitly observes, this whole episode is deeply emblematic of the important point that Paul Krugman made today -- namely, that the Right's embrace of this kind of ideology really reflects a significant divide in American politics, between people who simply believe people should want to return to the "good old days" before FDR and the New Deal, and people who believe that the incredible economic and cultural powerhouse that era produced was the product of a desirable balancing act between governmental power and individual rights.

As Krugman puts it:

There’s no middle ground between these views. One side saw health reform, with its subsidized extension of coverage to the uninsured, as fulfilling a moral imperative: wealthy nations, it believed, have an obligation to provide all their citizens with essential care. The other side saw the same reform as a moral outrage, an assault on the right of Americans to spend their money as they choose.

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Anderson Cooper needs to stick to oil spills and hurricanes because when it comes to political commentary he's as lame as the Fox journalists. There's only one story to be told when it comes to the Shirley Sherrod fiasco: Andrew Breitbart lied. That's all. Andrew. Breitbart. lied.

But this is what journalism is today. There is no one with enough of a moral compass to just come out and say that in the media. This is why, by the way, Robert Gibbs and the Obama Administration won't say it either. I'll get to that toward the end of this post, but first let's have a look at Anderson Cooper's Invented America.

COOPER: But we begin with a political storm that nearly destroyed Shirley Sherrod. President Obama spoke with her on the phone today. And we will speak to her in a moment about that conversation.

But first the blogger who slammed Shirley Sherrod, we're "Keeping Them Honest." He is the only actor in this dismal drama that has not apologized to Ms. Sherrod. And, in fact, he says he is the victim and that the Obama administration and mainstream media are out to destroy him.

He told Politico today -- quote -- "I am public enemy number one or two to the Democratic Party, the progressive movement and the Obama administration based upon the successes my journalism has had."

Now, calling what Mr. Breitbart does journalism is hard for those of us who actually check and try to be fair. I'm certainly not perfect, and have made mistakes, and have apologized for them. But journalism shouldn't be about left and right. It should be about the truth.

Up to this point, I'm right there with him. Yes, journalism shouldn't be about left and right. It should be about truth. And facts. And full telling of the truth and facts. If Anderson Cooper had stopped here, I'd be applauding. Andrew Breitbart wouldn't know the truth if it reared up and breathed hot fire in his face.

But this is not what journalists do. We don't live in an age where they actually call it what it is and move on to the next story. No, instead they have to create that false "balance", or equivalence that just doesn't exist.

The single reason that Robert Gibbs and other Obama administration officials, including the President himself, will not call out Fox News and Breitbart is because of stupid assertions like the ones Cooper is about to make. If Gibbs had pointed out that the entire story was the product of a lie manufactured by Andrew Breitbart for attention and giggles, the narrative would have shifted to "Mean President Obama Whines and Picks on Andrew Breitbart".

The administration would have been painted as "petty", "blaming", "ducking the issue". It would have just obfuscated the truth of the matter, which is simple, and which I will repeat a few more times: Andrew Breitbart lied.

What Mr. Breitbart does and what others on the left and the right do may very well be what journalism has become, but it isn't certainly not what it should be. Mr. Breitbart also Politico -- quote -- "The desire here is to make it about me and not the Democratic establishment and the NAACP vs. the Tea Party."

That's been Mr. Breitbart's excuse since it was revealed that his video was not what he said it was. He claims this was never about Shirley Sherrod. In fact, he said to Sean Hannity -- quote -- "I could care less about Shirley Sherrod, to be honest with you."

That is the one thing he has said that is indisputable. He does not care about Shirley Sherrod, doesn't care about making false allegations against her or ruining her career. Andrew Breitbart has his ideology. He believes he is right. And in his mind that justifies any action he takes.

I'm still good with it through this point, even. Cooper has clearly named the villain in the plot and called it non-journalism, which it is. He could have even said Andrew Breitbart just lied, but we all know that would be too good to be true. His next segment is where he falls off the edge of the planet into Outer Journo space:

And that's how ideologues think on the left and on the right. Post a video clip that's misleading? No problem if it helps you make your argument, if it helps boost visitors to your Web site. Make false claims about a person? Why not, if it gets you more Web traffic?

That is where we are today. Andrew Breitbart is conservative. But, as I said, there are liberals online and on TV who do the exact same things. They cherry-pick the facts that prove their arguments, not the facts that reveal the truth.

Oh, really? If you know of any liberal blogger who has intentionally edited a video clip to mislead and cause entire organizations serving poor folks to crumble, post a comment with a link, please. Anderson Cooper's equivalence sounds oh, so lofty until you sit down and ask yourself where exactly are these misleading video clips posted from the left that destroy people?

Where are they? Where is the left saying that an entire organization on the right loaded up voter registrations with bogus Republicans? I've only seen proven allegations with a criminal record to back them up.

Where ARE those lefty videos? Please, show them to me.

Of course, you can't. Because there are none. Huffington Post, which is probably the closest thing to Breitbart's sites, has nothing like that video. This site doesn't. Daily Kos? FireDogLake? I don't see any there. So please, tell me where are these videos?

Of course, Anderson doesn't stop with that. He invokes one of the 'reasonable right' (and I use the term guardedly) to back his assertions.

David Frum, a conservative, said on this program last night the problem is not liberalism or conservatism. It's factionalism, seeing the world through your own limited political lens and never admitting when you have made a mistake, never admitting the other side may be right some of the time, never doing anything that damages your faction.

Funny, I've been known to hammer on those to the left of me about hammering on our own, because they are all too willing sometimes to flog OUR side at the expense of the bigger picture, in my opinion. Whether I hammer or not, there's always someone in the liberal blogosphere willing to take OUR side to task without regard to what the rotten Right might be up to. So again, I'd really like to see the evidence of that. Show us. Quit saying it and show me the goods.

It's a game for people like Mr. Breitbart and others. They don't go out into the field and meet the people they're supposedly reporting on. They don't go out and challenge their assumptions. They stay behind a desk and see the world as black or white, left or right. And it's a lot more complex than that.

Actually, Anderson, here's a news flash for you. I've met Andrew Breitbart and he doesn't sit behind a desk all day. He sits in a bottle a lot, though. Why not call him what he is? A bully, an idealogue, a liar and a likely lush.

This isn't a question of "both sides do it." What Breitbart did, by his own admission, was use a government employee as a weapon to stir racial tension. The fact that it worked at first is another issue entirely. He lied to get a reaction. Andrew Breitbart lied. Repeat after me: Andrew Breitbart lied.

Where I come from, that's dishonest antagonism. Not journalism.

John and I have been wandering the halls at Netroots Nation here in Vegas this week, having a blast hanging out with our blogospheric friends. But we also led one of the conference's first panels yesterday morning, titled "Right Wing Populism and the Tea Parties".

It also featured our friend Adele Stan of AlterNet and the amazing Hugh Jackson of the Las Vegas Gleaner. Of course, I'm a little biased, but I thought the ensuing discussion was very good, the room was pretty full and the questions very thoughtful.

Turns out that some folks from rightward publications were there too. Susan Davis of the Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire was there and filed a pretty balanced story.

However, I noticed that she also truncated not only the title of our book, Over the Cliff -- she omitted the subtitle, How Obama's Election Drove the American Right Insane, though that in fact was a significant theme of the panel as well -- she also truncated the quote from me as well:

“After the 2008 election we were all celebrating, but we also became complacent,” said liberal blogger David Neiwert. “The right never gives up.”

“The answer to the tea party is to activate the populist wing of the progressive movement,” he said. “We need to seize on [the public’s frustration] ourselves and channel it to our movement.”

What I actually said in full was this:

"After the 2008 election we were all celebrating, but we also became complacent. But having studied the right for many years, I can tell you: They never, ever, give up. They are relentless. Even after their ideology has been completely discredited by eight years of conservative rule, even after they have driven the country into an economic abyss, they keep going -- even if it means going insane in the process."

Oh well.

And then there was Chris Moody of the Daily Caller, who couldn't take the time to talk to any of us afterward, and wrote an even more distorted account headlined "Liberals warn: Don’t write off the Tea Party (even if they’re crazy)".

You'll note, if you read the piece, that Moody omits my explanation for why we call the Right "insane," namely this, which I said:

"We say that they've gone insane a little bit facetiously, but really, we say it because they believe things -- lots of things -- that are provably untrue. And that really is a kind of insanity. It's why we sometimes just say these people are nuts."

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Well, it's a blow to the progressive movement but not the end of the world. (Especially since Halter wasn't really all that progressive.)

I do wonder if progressives might be better served by pouring all that money into lobbying on causes rather than pushing candidates who so often end up being absorbed by the Beltway Borg, anyway. Because I don't think we have enough time left to build a new Congress - but that's just me:

WASHINGTON — On a primary election night when the heralded anti-incumbency sentiment was expected to again demonstrate its strength, Senator Blanche Lincoln proved there were clear limits to its power.

Virtually written off as a likely victim of voter outrage at veteran politicians, Mrs. Lincoln, a two-term Arkansas Democrat, showed that an experienced office-holder with money, message and determination still had a chance to prevail even in a toxic environment.

“Blanche has proven once again she is a true independent voice for the people of Arkansas, but she is also a fighter for what she believes in and will never stop standing up for her convictions or for her state,” said Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

But while Mrs. Lincoln survived to fight on in the general election, incumbents in both parties could not take much solace from the outcome in Arkansas. In South Carolina, Representative Bob Inglis, a veteran Republican, was forced into a runoff election after finishing a distant second in the battle to hold on to his seat. And Gov. Jim Gibbons, Republican of Nevada, lost his primary.

A conservative-leaning friend of mine had to needle me when I was griping about current defense issues - he said, hey, be careful what you ask for, these are "your" progressives. I had to shoot back a response, in essence, saying no, these were not "my" progressives because I didn't see any progressives in the White House. I don't think I have to elaborate to anyone that the progressive movement is bitterly disappointed with the Obama administration and Congress.

"Progressives have grown ever more dissatisfied, and for good reason," Robert Borosage, the conference organizer, said at the start. "Our hopes or illusions were shattered: escalation in Afghanistan, retreat on Guantanamo, no movement on worker rights or comprehensive immigration reform, dithering on 'don't ask, don't tell,' reverses on choice, delay on climate change and new energy."

There's nothing so much as the Obama administration's willingness to retain former Bush administration officials that emphasizes this fact. Let's leave SecDef Bob Gates and FBI director Robert Mueller alone for now, and look at former Lt Gen James Clapper, nominated to be the next Director of National Intelligence. Now I don't really care that this administration keeps on pushing retired general/flag officers into public service, although others do (I think it's Obama's attempt to influence Republicans from blocking his nominations). I'm more disturbed by Clapper's former record on intelligence issues, notably when referencing Saddam's alleged WMD program in 2003.

The idea that Saddam hid his WMD stockpiles and programs by secretly shipping them to Syria has been popular for years among some of the most avid supporters of George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq. Nevertheless, lengthy and expensive investigations by the Iraq Survey Group, a special team set up by Bush to look for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, found only traces of them. The inquiry concluded that Saddam had largely destroyed his WMD stockpiles and production infrastructure years before the invasion, retaining only the ability to restart the program if it became possible. Experts affiliated with both the Republican and Democratic parties now say the Iraq Survey Group’s evidence shows overwhelmingly that Saddam’s WMD programs and stockpiles were eliminated well before the U.S. invasion. Claims that Iraqi WMDs might still be hidden in Syria are now regarded as no more than a fringe conspiracy theory.

Current and former U.S. intelligence officials, requesting anonymity when discussing sensitive information, confirm to Declassified that Clapper supported the theory. One of the officials says Clapper was a fairly enthusiastic proponent of the idea, but three others say they don’t remember his being a bitter-end advocate of the notion; they suggest he probably abandoned it after the Iraq Survey Group reported its conclusions. One of the officials says Clapper was "not much of an ideologue."

Nevertheless, he apparently stuck with the theory for at least six months after the invasion. The Washington Times’s ace defense reporter, Bill Gertz, described Clapper in an Oct. 29, 2003, story as telling a group of defense journalists at a breakfast that spy-satellite images of vehicle traffic indicated that material and documents related to the WMD programs had been shipped to Syria. "Those below the senior leadership saw what was coming and I think they went to extraordinary lengths to dispose of the evidence," Clapper was quoted as saying.

I heard these rumors, never saw any evidence that supported movements of MWD materials and munitions to Syria. I'd like to think that Syria wouldn't be so stupid as to support this move, and if it had done so to benefit its own WMD program, well, that's just prudent politics. But the facts remain that Saddam's WMD program was not active at the time of the invasion, that he did not have a stockpile of munitions that he was preparing to give to terrorists, and that a preventive invasion was a really bad solution to that threat. So why keep Clapper in the administration? Has he repented? Does he accept the Iraq Survey Group's findings?

I'm quite enjoying Matt Yglesias's book Heads In the Sand, where he explains this inexplicable tendency of old-school Democrats to actually apply their energy and agenda in the same direction as right-wing conservatives, even though, time after time, we've seen this strategy backfire on them. This administration is showing the same tendencies that Yglesias points out, and it's damned frustrating. We deserve better than this. We campaigned for a progressive platform, and we didn't get the progressive positions that we wanted. We're nearly out of time to influence this administration to change for the better - if the Repubs win at the mid-terms, Obama will be forced to compromise even more to the right, and the progressive positions will just vanish in 2011-2012.

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Glenn Beck seems to be on a crusade of sorts to try to claim the Civil Rights Movement for conservatives. Lotsa luck with that, big guy.

Yesterday on his Fox News show he opened a segment with this:

Beck: I told you this summer that we are going to concentrate on restoring history. The history of our nation, the founding, the 20th century, the Depression era, um, and the Civil Rights Movement, which has been co-opted by progressives.

Of course, if Beck wants to make this claim, he won't be "restoring" history, unless by "restoring" you mean "utterly falsifying and inverting on its head".

Because, of course, as we've explained several times, the Civil Rights Movement from its very inception was a progressive cause. Beck's favorite Civil Rights icon, Martin Luther King, was a leading advocate of the same "social justice" that Beck now openly despises.

This whole project of Beck's -- built around his August 28 "Restoring Honor" rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial -- is more than a little peculiar. It's become evident he wants to claim the mantle of the Civil Rights Movement for he and his fellows on the American Right.

There's only one little problem with all of that: Not only was the Civil Rights Movement a progressive cause from the start, it was the American Right that opposed, attacked, condemned, and undermined the Civil Rights marchers at every turn. It was conservatives, the Glenn Becks of their day, who publicly reviled them and inspired the deadly lynch mobs and Klansmen who committed acts of violence against them.

Indeed, some of their propaganda looks more than a little familiar, don't you think?

This, you see, was a flier that was distributed widely as part of a campaign to discredit King as a Communist. Among the formost leaders in that campaign, especially among Mormons, was none other than the Church's future president, Ezra Taft Benson.

Here are some prime quotes from Benson:

“LOGAN, UTAH-Former Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson charged Friday night that the civil-rights movement in the South had been ‘formatted almost entirely by the Communists.’ Elder Benson, a member of the Council of the Twelve of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said in a public meeting here that the whole civil-rights movement was ‘phony.’” (Deseret News, Dec. 14, 1963)

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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:

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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":

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OK, I know it's hard to imagine Glenn Beck getting much worse than his history-abusing eliminationist attacks on the progressive movement, or his constant smearing of anyone who works for President Obama as a likely Marxist.

But yesterday, he managed -- by unleashing an all-out attack on President Obama's family, and particularly his mother. It doesn't get much lower than that.

Of course, he opened the attack on Obama's family by saying that he was not attacking them. Really. And then he proceeded immediately to smear them:

I want you to know that I am by no means attacking his family. And in fact, I think after the first five minutes of the show tonight, you're actually going to feel sorry for the little boy, Barry Obama -- the boy, the little one. This little boy. He's so cute! I don't feel sorry for the man, but the tragedy of this kid's childhood is staggering!

Lessee ... you're not attacking his family, but then turn around and immediately claim that they abandoned the poor little kid. Come again?

His parents, seemingly, from what you can piece together, his parents seemingly placed radical politics over everything else, including their little boy!

I am not one to talk. I grew up with a Dad who worked all the time. He was a small business owner, he owned the city bakery in Mount Vernon, Washington. And, um the only time I saw him was at work. I work all the time. My kids come to work, and we spend time at my job, or we travel together. A lot of us do this. We have long hours and we support our families.

But how many of us have been abandoned for the bakery? Or my job? Or your job? Would you ever leave your kid for that?

How about -- how many of us have been abandoned for a Marxist political theory? Or politics? This didn't happen to little Barack Obama once but twice. Both parents!

Of course, Obama's father did indeed essentially abandon his family -- but it wasn't for politics, it was for personal ambition: he wanted to attend Harvard without the encumbrances of a wife and tiny son. The senior Obama was not a particularly admirable guy.

But then Beck turns to the subject of Obama's late mother, who Obama himself described as "the one who was the single constant in my life," and "that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her."

How does Beck describe her? Why, as a commie sympathizer, of course:

She was described by a friend as, quote, "a fellow traveler." If anybody who reads about progressives and Marxism, you recognize that language.

Yes indeed we do. "Fellow traveler" is what the McCarthyite Red-baiters of the 1950s liked to call liberals. Of course, the proof for Beck is that Dunham actually supported Adlai Stevenson in the 1956 election. Impressive, no?

Dunham later left to Hawaii, to travel to Indonesia for a second time, and then she left her son to move to Pakistan. She left her son with her parents. This is the second time this poor little boy was left by a parent!

This is complete and utter rubbish. Stanley Ann Dunham did not at any time "abandon" her son, and Beck's claim that she did is a filthy smear of the lowest sort.

From Wikipedia:

It was at the East-West Center that Dunham met Lolo Soetoro, a student from Indonesia. They married in 1966 or 1967 and moved with six-year-old Barack to Jakarta, Indonesia, just after the unrest surrounding the ascent of Suharto. ... In Indonesia, Dunham enriched her son's education with correspondence courses in English, recordings of Mahalia Jackson, and speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. She sent the young Obama back to Hawaii to attend Punahou School rather than having him stay in Asia with her. Madelyn Dunham's job as a vice-president at the Bank of Hawaii helped pay the steep tuition, with some assistance from a scholarship. ... Ann Dunham left Soetoro in 1972, returning to Hawaii and reuniting with her son Barack for several years.

... Dunham returned to graduate school in Honolulu in 1974, while raising Barack and Maya. When Dunham returned to Indonesia for field work in 1975 with Maya, after three years in Honolulu, Barack chose not to go, preferring to finish high school in Hawaii while living with his grandparents.

So, to quickly recap: Ann Dunham never "abandoned" Barack Obama. She did send him to a private school for the sake of giving him an elite education -- which is hardly the same as abandonment. And when she returned to Indonesia to conduct field work as an anthropologist, the teenaged Obama chose to stay in Hawaii with his grandparents instead -- again, nothing particularly unusual about that.

And for what it's worth, Dunham didn't go to work in Pakistan until the late 1980s, by which time she was conducting work for the Asia Development Bank (which suggests, coincidentally, that Dunham was not exactly an opponent of capitalism). And "little Barry" by that time was a full-grown man in his 20s.

There's a lot more wrong with Beck's attack on Obama's family, particularly his smearing of Obama's grandparents as likely Marxists because they attended a Unitarian Church.

But if nothing else, it proves something we've already come to know: There is no depth to which Glenn Beck will not sink.

And at this point, he's just wallowing in scum.

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Glenn Beck's eliminiationist jihad against the progressive movement took an interesting rhetorical turn yesterday, when Beck tried to claim that the "progressive road" leads to Communism and Nazism:

Beck: It's not about Communists. Never has been about Communists, either. Really hasn't. That's guy's a lunatic fringe. Just like the white supremacists on the other side. Right here! [Points to chalkboard diagram]

This side, up and down! Communists and fascists -- those people are crazy! This is about progressivism. And most people, they're in here -- when they say they are progressive, they don't think they're headed here. But progress -- baby steps -- you are moving toward something! You are moving toward one of these.

This is why they called George Bush a fascist. Because progressives know what's at the end of the progressive road -- Nazis or Communists! Someone has to control your life. Someone will be at the controls.

Communists would like it to be them. Nazis are rooting for their side. I'm not rooting for any side! I'm rooting for this side [points to right side of diagram]. Wrong side of the scale, guy!

Now, there's at least some reason to connect progressivism with Communism, since they are both left-wing phenomena and share at least some values. But Nazism?

Let's look at some real American Nazis -- say, the folks who come out in support of Sheriff Joe Arpaio:

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See anything "progressive" there? Actually, you do -- you see it among the pro-immigrant marchers the Nazis are protesting against.

But you'd have a hard time convincing anyone -- especially these neo-Nazis themselves -- that they have anything even remotely to do with "progressivism." Indeed, the very thing that animates them into barbaric bloodlust is the progressive movement -- that is, the desire to destroy it utterly.

As we've explained previously, in the context of Jonah Goldberg's fraudulent Liberal Fascism thesis -- which, of course, is the basis for Beck's lumping of fascism and communism together under the "end of the progressive road" -- what makes these people right-wing extremists is that they not only adopt right-wing political positions, they take them to their most extreme logical (if that's the word for it) outcome:

• They not only oppose abortion, they believe abortion providers should be killed.
• They not only believe that liberal elites control the media and financial institutions, but that a conniving cabal of Jews is at the heart of this conspiracy to destroy America.
• They not only despise Big Government, they believe it is part of a New World Order plot to enslave us all.
• They not only defend gun rights avidly, they stockpile them out of fear that President Obama plans to send in U.N. troops to take them away from citizens.
• They not only oppose homosexuality as immoral, they believe gays and lesbians deserve the death penalty.
• They not only oppose civil-rights advances for minorities, they also believe a "race war" is imminent, necessary and desirable.

And on and on. Every part of the agenda of the agenda of right-wing extremists is essentially an extreme expression of conservative positions. And that, fundamentally, is why American fascism always has been and always will be, properly understood, an unmistakable phenomenon of the Right.

Methinks Beck needs some better diagrams.