@ Rocketman:
I think one of your original comments - about GB's method of stitching together facts in a distortive manner - is more indicative of his overall approach. Getting stuck on isolated factoids tends to serve his purpose, encouraging relatively trivial skirmishes while leaving the the main action unaffected. In that, he practices a crude version of what intellectually more sophisticated polemicists and partisan scholars do. He gets away with it because his national "high school class" may not know very much at all about the subjects he covers, and is happy to absorb information in a way that, in scapegoating others, seems to boost them.

@ Fourstring Casady:
That's a great idea! Thanks for another terrific contribution!

@ fuster:
I think "pecksniff" is an O'Reilly word, or a contraction of an O'Reilly word - don't ask, if you don't know, not worth it. In contracted form "pecksniffian" reads as vulgar. Don't know if that was the intention. Style point, maybe. No points for congeniality.

@ fuster:
(I can't go chiding some commenters for attacking others, then leave up comments like the one from RagnarD that consist of nothing but insults - knowing what likely will eventuate, sooner or later - you know, broken windows.)

@ Fourstring Casady:
Missed you little para-frog, and your chirping against big bad Joe. Hope everything's alright in your zonality.

@ narciso:
That's just ad hominem, narciso, against Lind. His article describes the intellectual pedigree of Beck & Goldberg's polemics. On that point, it would make little difference whether Lind is a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, top organizer for the Communist International, or resident in a suburban prison for the criminally insane. Can't it go without saying that you can disagree with someone on one or several points without presuming he's incapable of constructing a bibliography?

@ Joe NS:
The "fury" in your posts is mostly what you direct at others who have the misfortune of actually being familiar with the subject at hand. Rocketman described an incident. I didn't witness it, but it strikes me as the usual Beck, and I didn't find the description hard to understand at all. It seems to me that when you have difficulty "understanding English," your reflex is to blame others and then insult them.

FYI - Beck seized upon Jonah Goldberg's LIBERAL FASCISM sometime last year (a work whose flaws I discussed at https://ckmacleod.com/2010/04/09/on-re-reading-liberal-fascism-defining-fascism-down/ ). Since that time, he has also had the distinguished, very rightwing scholar Ronald Pestritto, whose critique of progressivism JG borrows from, on his show as a guest. To critique Pestritto, you may need to consult other scholars - you can get some hints here. (Incidentally, I believe that the image that accompanies that article is manufactured, and salon.com should be ashamed if so - Beck if not.)

Beck is also basking in the glow of high ratings and his new Fox following, and he would hardly be the first person in the history of the mass media to have been "promoted" above his competence, and to have his weaknesses exposed under the intensified glare of fame, perceived widening influence, and mega-bucks.

All of the flaws you concede, and others, have been magnified by the attention he's received, and by the requirements of his shtick (as I try to suggest in the concluding paragraph of the top post). It's a familiar story - the classic American media model being "Howard Beale," or, if you prefer literary references, "Elmer Gantry." Other literary and historical precedents are, of course, numerous. What's lacking so far is the climax - though sometimes the Beck-Gantry-Beale types simply fade away. Rush has avoided either fate, so far (though he's come close to blowing up and has had to weather a catastrophe or two), I think because he's a lot smarter than Beck, and guided by a larger political purpose and a deeper understanding of it.

@ Joe NS:
Joe, read my virtual lips: You don't know what you're talking about. You're basing your opinions on assumptions and speculation.

It's now a little more understandable to me why you would be going on and on in this furious, "preening" and "high-minded" craptastical defense of the intellectually indefensible and politically very highly questionable. I'd like to be able to say that someday you might sit down and watch GB on Fox closely, and feel a little embarrassed about ever having passionately defended that, but over recent days you've just about convinced me that your ideological commitments and prejudices are too deeply embedded even to be touched, much less dislodged.

@ Joe NS:
The comment highlighted by Rocketman and me strongly suggests that you do not consider yourself able to respond on the content of his current show. My suggestion is that you spend some more time at the beach bar before next rising up for the defense - and on the attack against others more familiar with the case.

Joe NS wrote:

If they’re intellectually threadbare,m as I’m perfectly willing to admit in advance they might be–I don’t have cable, so I couldn’t say–but Glenn Beck is not running a Great Books seminar ala Mortimer Adler.

Wait a second. You never watch Glenn Beck? All this on behalf of something you know little or nothing about firsthand?

Hilarious.

@ narciso:
Please name the historian, or even the pundit, who blamed the Depression on Harding/Coolidge tax cuts. I'm really curious to see such a case being made. I have some vague recollection of someone comparing minimal margin lending requirements to tax cut policy as stemming from the same ideology and encouraging bubble economics, but what you describe is something different. And which historians "state" that "the New Deal got us out" of the Depression? Even lovers of the New Deal and Roosevelt, the ones with which I'm familiar, make the much more conservative claim that the New Deal was a "bold" response or series of responses to the Depression, that held the country together and did all sorts of wonderful things (which would have been wonderfuller if not for the evil arch-conservatives, but that's another argument). The "it was really WW2 and/or time that changed things" position is widely held, in my observation, not some secret truth bravely maintained by the rightwing illuminati.

@ Rocketman:
Since you've replied to Joe, I'm not going to "moderate" his comment. I'd just put it in the pending queue ahead of asking Joe to get rid of the insults, but have now restored it. Sorry about his lack of manners.

TR was indeed a Progressive, with a capital "P." He was effectively the founder of the national Progressive Party, running as its candidate in 1912 (at least read the Cooper chapter on "the Great Campaign"). He also happened to differ greatly on many issues from other Progressives, not to mention other progressives, which is a testament to the difficulty of assigning some particular coherent theory or obligatory praxis to progressivism vis-a-vis constitutionalism or anything else.

Unlike socialists or communists, progressives weren't as a rule anti-capitalist, though they were, with few exceptions, against pure laissez-faire capitalism. They were a reform movement, not a revolutionary one, and the constant attempt to render them as revolutionaries, virtual revolutionaries, creeping revolutionaries, revolutionary stalking horses, etc., mainly serves to make the renderer out as a reactionary.

@ narciso:
Not the subject I was just discussing, narc. I was referring to the period ca. 1880 - 1920 - original (P)rogressivism. I haven't seen a case as to the unconstitutionality of all of 2009-10, not to say I doubt that one could be made or would be surprised to learn one has been made.

The original Progressives were very explicit about that: that constitutionalism was a hindrance to the implementation of their agenda.

This is where we begin to diverge I think in our understanding of progressivism and the progressive era. When you refer to "original Progressives" with a capital "P" it appears that you're referring to the Progressive Party, which never held national power, and managed to elect only a handful of representatives to the House and Senate. If you're referring to the original little P progressives, you can read through tons of material on and by them, and never encounter the question of constitutionalism. It just didn't have much relevance to the things they were dealing with, or, on the occasions that it did, they sought changes through constitutionally valid means.

As for the theorists, they're a different matter. Wilson, as a 29-year-old author seeking to make his mark, entertained a number of ideas - a parliamentary system, the necessity of not revering the Founding as a quasi-religious dispensation, various versions of "socialism" (in quotes because the meaning of the term was still in play in those days) - but he wasn't "original Progressivism." He wasn't even a nominal political progressive, though in those days people interested in new thinking and life styles generally might have called themselves "progressive."

Croly, Dewey, TR, and others writing and speaking during the 1900s and later all had a lot to say, and some took the question of Constitutionalism head on, but they spoke for themselves, in their time, not for "real, existing progressivism" in toto.

So who precisely are you referring to - check your Pestritto anthology if that's your source, please - when you described the O.P. as anti-constitutional? You don't identify them, instead you skip ahead to FDR, not remotely an O.P., then move to this observation:

I sense that you express often a view that soft socialism hasn’t led to hard socialism in America yet, and people are being alarmist to say it will — but it’s the very constitutionalism that you find unrealistic and radical that has held the harder socialism in check, as evidenced by the SCOTUS New Deal strikedown.

I don't find constitutionalism radical. I find radical constitutionalism radical, and contradictory to the spirit of the constitutional project and the American project, and therefore untenable.

The Constitution is the fundamental rulebook of our national political game. To implement socialism in the U.S. might require amendment of the Constitution, or a revolution. The former would allow for Constitutional Socialism - not something I favor, but not something "outside the rules."

A few years back an NFL progressive might have thought that an instant replay rule was necessary to preserve the integrity of the game, and the physical safety and other personal interests of the referees, in an age when millions of people watching on TV could see clear as day that a critical call was wrong. A radical NFL constitutionalist would have said, no, the rules are the rules, they can't be changed, and wanting to change them shows that you're a lousy fan, and if we keep on changing the rules then the game will be destroyed. It was good enough for Unitas, it's good enough for me.

Eventually, as we know, the NFL progressives won the argument, and, though there were problems with the application of the rule, and though there may be a few people who will never accept it, the rules were changed.

There's no objective standard for saying that the progs were anti-rulebook or anti-NFL. They believed in changing the rulebook, and, following the by-laws of their organization (I don't really know exactly how the decision was made), they got the rule changes they sought. Both sides were equally "constitutionalist" in that sense, and the game goes on.

@ narciso:
Contentions had a post on what I believe would be that same ridic Newsweek reading - was that the one where they claimed that A deT was indifferent to slavery? Must have been reading a badly abridged version if so. Perhaps we can agree that DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA will likely be read with interest for much longer than last week's Newsweek.

@ Zoltan Newberry:
Reminds me of Amiri Baraka, actually - you wouldn't have to do too much to the poem to turn it into a "real authentic radical attacks the sellouts & Amerika, too" piece.

Anyway, well-plied, Comrade Newberry.

@ narciso:
I get the impression you haven't finished the Cooper book. Wilson flirted with imperialism early on, during the period you mention and when it didn't matter much, but the description of him as a reluctant to go to war, anti-imperialist in every way that counted once he took power, and virtually obsessed with achieving and ensuring peace - in that specific sense a "pacifist" - is very much supported by the later chapters. TR, almost to the day he died, excoriated Wilson for his failure to swing the big stick.

@ Ken:
De Tocqueville's description of the extirpation of the natives - not the same as their murder - is to my knowledge unsurpassed. You should read it. The rest of the history of the extirpation of the native tribes is needless to say a broad subject. It's self-evident the preservation of their ways of life as they had pursued them and the expansion and settlement of the United States were incompatible. I think that fairly expresses how both sides saw the situation as it developed at the time. The removal of the Indians was a condition of the realization of America's manifest destiny.

I'm not some lefty calling up Michael Medved and asking for trouble. I'm familiar with the arguments you're making, and have been known to make some of them myself from time to time, on this very blog.

The "peculiar institution" was, during the period I was referring to, a mainstay of cotton farming and other forms of agriculture, the basis of the economy of the South. De Tocqueville's rather good on that, too, as a matter of fact, though unusually pessimistic for him.

Needless to say, whole libraries have been devoted to both subjects, so I doubt we'll discover anything novel about them here. I stand by what I wrote.

@ Ken:
It probly is a "moral necessity" in a constitutional republic to accept the government as legitimate until and unless lawful opportunities for redress of grievances have been foreclosed. There's no statutory or constitutionally ordained penalty for acting unconstitutionally, or some requirement for ejection from office. It's not a high crime or misdemeanor - in itself - though it's of course possible to imagine unconstitutional acts that rise to that level. You're of course free to believe that the government has acted illegitimately, as am I to believe that reaching that conclusion on the basis of a given supposedly or arguably unconstitutional act is a bad standard. Among other things, if accepted as a compulsory doctrine, it would mean that any president interested in retaining office would need to suborn or coerce the Supreme Court ahead of time. Conceptually it would already amount to a violation of separation of powers even before a wary executive or congresspeople acted to defend themselves and their prerogatives.

As for strangelet, I've criticized her many times for intemperate and antagonistic rhetoric, and even specifically for the "genocidalism" on a recent thread, although I later withdrew the remark, since I don't see her that way really and had only been trying to make a point. She seems bigoted to me, and vindictive about "WEC"'s, but I don't think she's dreaming of anti-WEC laws and WEC concentration camps. I don't see any comment on this thread that cross any lines in that regard. Perhaps you can point me to what you find unacceptable.

I never said that Glenn Beck's claims against Van Jones and Wilson were "false." I certainly implied that he goes about propagating them in an exaggerated, misleading, and, to me, absurdly ridiculous way. I plan on getting to Wilson soon (in more detail than in the review of Liberal Fascism), and one of our regular commenters has been promising to swoop in with a vengeance against my sadly unconvincing apologetics, so perhaps we can save that for later.

@ Joe NS:
I don't see how any of that is supposed to constitute an argument at all, nor why I should be obligated to defend the New Deal or FDR - though I'll happily volunteer that he wasn't a Hitler or a Stalin in my view, and may have been instrumental in preventing a real American fascism or communism from spreading.

As for the historical argument, the people of this country - you know, those pesky Americans - experienced massive alterations in their lives, and widely came to view those changes, at least the positive ones, as "progress." Those who believed government needed to modernize as well, not least out of self-defense from other powers affecting people's lives for good or ill, eventually came to be known as political "progressives."

One major reason the Federal Government wasn't a "presence" in the "daily lives" of Americans up to the 1930s would be sheer technological limitations. The first radio speeches weren't given until the 1920s, for instance, and even then the technology needed years to come into general use. From around 1900 through 1920, the federal government's actual reach and power expanded, in accordance with the rise of the country on the international stage, among other things. This process was greeted with great enthusiasm by many in those years, suspicion and fear by a smaller number, somewhat as today in some respects.

Anyway, I consider that a narrow and ahistorical definition of "presence." When the Federal Government opened up Kansas and Nebraska to settlement, there weren't x-thousand little Obami passing out forms and dreaming of future thermostats to tax, but the influence of government on the daily lives of those Americans was total: Those daily lives would have been completely different if not for acts of the Federal Government. Same can be said, all the more, for the daily lives of the prior inhabitants of those lands.

@ Joe NS:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

As for the long train of abuses and usurpations as experienced in the late 18th century, and what might or might not be going on today. Who can say? In the meantime, I find it amusing to consider that Jefferson may have envisioned some kind of "baggage train" or some such - simple wagons perhaps hitched together carrying pots and pans, pulled by beasts of burden, tended by farmers whose right and left shoes would have been interchangeable - while the modern reader must on some level have images of modern transportation networks stimulated deep in the brainpan, or anyway the train that on occasion interrupts a daily commute.

We know that TJ couldn't ring up George or George's secretary or secretary's secretary and complain about that morning's abuse or usurpation, but y'all in St Croix can, voting privileges in Congress or not.

Sometimes you boil the water, sometimes the water boils you, but not all actions on the stove are pre-meditated frogicide. Sure there are dangers. Always have been, always will be. Part of having some element of free will and giving our fellow citizens the right also to be wrong. It's a disease whose symptoms must be managed, and even encouraged, to inoculate us against worse ones, and forestall, worst of all, the cures.

J.E. Dyer wrote:

Frankly, it looked to me like getting the health care bill passed in March fit the descriptions of both fighting as though their backs were against the wall, and stopping at nothing to get their way.

If we can't maintain any distinction between gaming the system and "stopping at nothing," then we're lost in the midnight in which all opponents are gray fascists, especially when they win. The rhetorical slide begins here, in combination with the selective historicizing that makes a warmonger of Woodrow Wilson and vast majorities of living and breathing Americans doing what came naturally to living and breathing Americans - adjusting the course of their government - into vast orc armies in the grip of Sauron.

I wasn't thinking only of Auschwitz, but, since you bring up the topic of genocide, it's odd to have this fanciful discussion of the perfectly good and free America laid low by the fiendish orc-progs, in cross-generational conspiracies of centralizing soul-destroying cowardice, when the constitutional idyll that preceded the first embers of progressivism was accompanied by and conditioned upon the extirpation of several pre-existing nations, and the enslavement of a race. So you'll have to excuse me if I don't regard the health insurance mandate as the greatest threat ever to the pristine American soul.

I'm not interested in unburying my tears and flagellating my patriotism at virtual Wounded Knee. I'm merely pointing out that history seems to work in many directions, not any one in particular. The imposition of false but narrationally convenient linear developments on the great what-was is one progressivism that truly deserves to be considered obsolete.

For instance, your summary:

Regardless of what we call it, the pattern of wanting more government to coerce more people to do more things has always led to bad consequences.

It's still not clear to me how you cope with the fact that, according to your own narration, the progressives have run more and more of everything according to that scheme, and yet over the same period our little country has risen to pre-eminence. The broad overview and takeaway is that the period of "wanting more government to coerce more people to do more things" has also been the period of the greatest and best national enterprise known to history (I mean that, take it as an apology for sounding like an America-hater in regard to the Natives and the Slaves).

Now, you may say that the great rise was in spite of, not because of the ideology of progress. I find that unlikely, and, rather than seeing progressivism as located on the path to the Gulag and the Concentration Camp, I see it as the successful and very American set of imperfect compromises that kept us off that path, at the precise time that all over the world others were rushing down it en masse. But even if you refuse to consider Social Security as one alternative to Socialism, rather than a step toward Socialism, it takes a stupendous and all-embracing amnesia to miss the fact that from, say 1880 to 1920, or from 1850 to 2010, unimaginably vast simultaneous and interconnected transformations in all social, cultural, political, and economic realms, vastly disturbing as well as vastly expansive and innovative, were occurring. The new demands on inherited institutions of self-government were equally vast. Of course government and expectations of government changed, mightily. Some things were gotten mightily wrong, no doubt. How could you expect anything else?

Back to our reality:

The Dems won big in '08. They acted big in '09-'10. I've referred to it as a moment of hypertrophied progressivism, progressivism at its moment of perfect self-contradiction and transformation into its opposite - for as much as I'm compelled to play the role of "defender of the great concept" on these threads, I consider myself an ardent opponent of Obamism.

The opposition rallied against the neo-progs and pushed them hard, and now has an opportunity, if they have the wits to seize and exploit it, to reverse '09-'10 over the course of '11 - ? . That's how things are supposed to work. If the opposition fails, then American governance may be re-conceptualized in the neo-progressive image. That, also, is how things are supposed to work - human beings, human passions, and human ideas being imperfect, we can reach the wrong consensus, too, and no piece of paper will stop it, though some pieces of paper can aid us in the work of reversing that bad consensus - but we'll need a legitimate government, and an insistence that all sides abide by legitimately achieved decisions, to do the work we'd prefer to see done. Undermining the legitimacy of those institutions with exaggerated and one-sided claims and calumnies will do us no favor in the long run - unless we're much more eager than the Founders were to settle the issue by violence.

J.E. Dyer wrote:

Could you outline briefly the course you hoped Palin would be on?

Not GB-ing down my neck and telling me it's sane.

I'll give your question some more thought, and try to respond as time permits.

@ Joe NS:
If you're going to persist in overtly personalizing these discussions, you could at least do CK MacLeod the courtesy of spelling his name right. This thread is not exactly the first time you've encountered it. If some arthritic condition prevents you from handling the letters "a," "c," and "l" properly, and upper and lower case, you might try copy and paste from any of the numerous comments on the thread. "McCleod" brings to mind a schoolyard taunt. I'd like to think you can do better.

The 16th Amendment was ratified in 1913 - according to all of the procedures meant to record a virtual consensus, as specified in that document that people like Glenn Beck and his defenders pretend to revere except when it's put to uses of which they don't approve. In your and Beck's rendering of history, the transformation of a tiny agrarian republic into a continent- and globe-spanning massively urbanized and con-urbanized neo-empire, with liberty and social services for all, is a despotic conspiracy, summoning all the minute men and women to Sam Adams dress-up and sophomoric invocations of the Declaration of Independence. Consensual democracy, conspiratorial despotism. Same initials. Main difference: whose ox-like self-regard is being gored.

@ adam:
One thing you've done is get me to take a long look at my concluding paragraphs and try to fiddle them into something that says what I mean to say more clearly, and doesn't try to say too much. I mainly wanted to focus on the immediate questions around SP's choices. I think for now I'll strike out the latest version of the last paragraph. I'd delete it if it hadn't made for an interesting speculative point of departure on your part. Maybe I'll figure out a better approach tomorrow.

@ narciso:
I'm not sure that we've arrived at an accurate description, or at any rate anyone has presented a convincing description of "what they are trying to do." I think "they" are made up of a coalition.

adam wrote:

Isn’t there room for Beck as well in this big nutty America? And for people who like Beck?

Absolutely. I don't advocate eradicating Beck til there's not a single cell of him left. I believe we can co-exist with Beck. For that matter, if he merely advocated quarantining progressivism or rolling it back, he'd give me a lot less to worry about.

The fans of Beck (and maybe Palin) are those whose biggest fear is that the new powers, if they come, will expect and rely upon respect from leading figures on the other side. That is, that they will allow reversing what can be reversed of the ongoing catastrophe to be held hostage to outmoded notions of comity and civility.

"Ongoing catastrophe" is a bit much. Poland 1943-4, Cambodia "Year Zero" - now those were ongoing catastrophes.

I'd have to know what you mean by "expect and rely," and what the Beckians would replace "outmoded... comity and respect" with. Are you anticipating or advocating a breakdown of the basic constitutional compact - that losers in the democratic game will or should cease abiding by (respecting) the results?

Isn't one of the chief complaints against the Obami, and chief cause of their declining political fortunes, that they have proceeded in a partisan and exclusive, cheatin'-hearted, extra-legal, non-traditional, etc., manner? Selling themselves as one thing - patriotic consensualist moderates with conservatively liberal goals, who'd hear all sides and reach the best decisions - but governing as evil partisan progressives? Adopting the Obama methods to attempt to reverses Obamism increases the risk of meeting another reversal amidst a heightening crisis.

Meanwhile, the Beckian rhetoric turns the other side into the enemy, and motivates them to fight as though their backs are against the wall. At the same time, the Beck-backers here have convinced themselves that the evil progressives will stop at nothing to get their way. So that's a formula for civil breakdown, or would be if it was based on an accurate depiction of social and political forces.

In the above ways, which parallel the simple homespun verbal tropes in Palin's little puff piece, the Beck-Palin rhetoric erodes the legitimacy of the political process, though not everyone is as explicit about this view as Ken above.

I heard Beck the other day call for "the least possible government." I believe that would be no government at all - for a little while. We'd never get there, as there are political and economic forces in the world that would be happy - or compelled by self-interest - to step in long before we reached zero state. So that's a silly fantasy - "the least possible government" would still be a lot of governing, mostly by people we have no reason to like very much.

Eliminating progressivism to the last cell is a silly fantasy. After the amputations and excisions were done, there'd be a lot less left on the operating table than thrown away.

Returning to a never-existent period of perfect constitutionalism may be an even more ridiculous fantasy, since there are historical examples of chaos and societal breakdown, but no evidence of some Constitutional Eden (or of a pre-Constitutional one - not even the indigenous tribal cultures come close to qualifying).

So unless we're going to flame out dreaming the impossible dream, after us the deluge, we're more likely to continue stuck in history, trying to make the best of it, adjusting the course of the ship of state, all in it together, strangelets and Palins, Becks and Obamas, no exit - Lindsey Grahams and John McCains brokering the compromises, since total victory for either side isn't possible without the elimination of the other side - and no one (hardly anyone, no one I take seriously) advocates that.

Zoltan Newberry wrote:

Teaching a growing audience to revere our Founders is a good thing, is it not?

Not necessarily - not on false pretenses to false ends.

And "growing audience" no longer applies. Beck's ratings are down 30% from the beginning of the year, 50% from their peak.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/20100429/ts_ynews/ynews_ts1857

Sully wrote:

None of us know precisely where we are on the curve that leads to the government controlling everything because it has been ceded responsibility for the results of everything.

What's your evidence of any such curve at all?

@ narciso:
My judgment is that she has many admirable qualities. She ain't a saint. She's quite capable of fibbing to make a positive impression. The only other conclusion, I'm afraid, is that she's so far out of the mainstream, or so indifferent, that Beck really does seem normal to her. I find the fibbing easier to believe. My criticism is about what she seems to be trying to achieve - or avoid - with it.

@ strangelet:
Can you point to any place where I suggested Palin was normal? She's also about as far from normal as just about anyone.

I've always sought to judge her by what she does. I held open the possibility that by now she'd be on a different course than she seems to be on. I don't harbor any regrets about giving her a chance, and I still think she has made a positive contribution and can still be of great service.

If for now I choose to distance myself from her or even oppose her, it won't be while trying to do to her and her supporters what you try to do - which is the mirror image of what you accuse them of. If you have a problem with Palin's "real America," don't be a hypocrite and imply you have access to "more real America." America's a big nutty place with room for Palin and strangelet both.

@ bob:
Well, it's hard to say, from my perspective, which conclusion would be most charitable to her. I think she's smart enough to know that she was playing a little make-believe, kind of like Trent Lott and Strom Thurmond. So I think she made two mistakes: dishonest flattery, and of an undeserving figure, because she wants to maintain her marketability to his audience.

@ Ken:
I think pretty soon you may have it worked out that YOU or maybe your uncle Jake brought down the USSR.

Reagan played a role. The Pope played a role. The senescence of the Communist leadership and the imbalances of the Soviet economy played a role. The active opposition of leaders in both parties over the course of decades played a role. But that's all secondary to the point I was making.

When Obama, Reid, and Pelosi ram through legislation that contains an unconstitutional mandate to buy medical insurance, they are themselves an illegitimate government, as surely as if Obama had become President in a military coup.

We have a system to decide whether the mandate is constitutional or not. By your argument, the Bush-Cheney admin was illegitimate - at least in the eyes of those who, along with the Supreme Court, disagreed with its proposals for handling detainees. I suppose that the Cleveland Administration and the Congress of 1894 were "illegitimate" in your eyes, since the Income Tax Act was found to be unconstitutional. There would be an argument for declaring virtually the whole of US history "illegitimate."

If believing that the government of the United States is legitimate is an "obsession," then I'm happy to be as obsessed as the vast majority of my fellow insane citizens.

@ narciso:
I use "Gulag" because Beck continually associates progressivism with Bolshevism (as well as Nazism, of course) during his "progress towards what" rifs. Or were you criticizing Beck?

@ Rex Caruthers:
You're preaching to the converted. Even worse if they make the mistake of standing up for their innocence and get convicted. A good friend of mine spent a year in jail for that, on a charge which, if he had pleaded out, he likely would have gotten community service and a fine. (Drunk driving, except he wasn't driving. Long story.) The hitch was that the conviction would have cost him his job for the county. So he fought, and lost. Also spent $1,000s on a lawyer - advertises on the radio - whose entire defense consisted of accompanying my friend to court and lamely trying to get him off on a technicality.

Wish Glenn Beck could get as interested in this subject as in George Bernard Shaw toying with the idea of euthanasia nearly 100 years ago.

@ Rex Caruthers:
I'm no fan of the drug war, our incarceration rate, or the conditions of our prisons - all of which in my view, especially the last two, qualify as a standing rebuke to conservatives and liberals alike.

Maybe everyone should be willing to spend two days in the County Jail every few years, or two days in the state pen, or two days in Supermaxx, just to get a real taste of what their fellow citizens - including ones picked up on trivial charges or wrongly arrested or convicted - are subjected to. Would be good for (most of) them and good for the jails, too. And if they're not willing to spend even two days in the general population, then maybe there's something very wrong with our prisons.

All that said - the prisoners aren't there because they questioned the wisdom of their leaders or distributed unapproved writings or were suspected of having done so.

Sully wrote:

The progressive impulse does lead eventually to gulags if followed. Beck is only wrong in presenting that endpoint as imminent.

The "progressive impulse" has reigned in this country politically for around half of the time that this country has existed politically (if not longer, depends on your definition). Last I checked, we were the ones who helped destroy the Gulagers.

@ narciso:
Any of that is supposed to make GB look responsible, intelligent, sane, or anything but embarrassing and problematic for conservatives?

@ JHM dba "Sniper":
I think Kristol Minor lost his grip on S.P. a long time ago, assuming he ever had one, and I'm pretty sure Kristol Minor is very wary of Glenn Beck, maybe even more wary than he is of the Pauls (K.M. criticized S.P.'s endorsement of Ayn Rand Paul). It's in no major R's interest to start a war with GB. Luckily enough for me, I'm not a major R, so I can say whatever I happen to think.