Here's.... Glenn!

It's hard to know where to begin with Glenn Beck.

Maybe we start with the racial arrow directed against the President of the United States. On July 28, 2009 he infamously remarked on" Fox and Friends"

This president, I think, has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture. I don't know what it is, but you can't sit in a pew with Jeremiah Wright for twenty years and not hear some of that stuff, and not have it wash over.....

I'm not saying that he doesn't like white people, I'm saying he has a problem. He has a -- this guy is, I believe, a racist. Look at the things that he has been surrounded by.

On his own program the next day, he reiterated "And that is that I said yesterday on Fox & Friends, 'I think the president is a racist. I think he has race issues. Don't know if he hates white people, but there's something going on with the president.' Well, I stand by that...." Interviewed by CBS News' Katie Couric on September 22, Beck labeled his initial assertion "a serious question that I think needs serious discussion."

But this series of remarks probably was harmless. On his show of January 14, 2011 ticked off the names of nine individuals, according to Media Matters for America, whom he contended are employing propaganda to manipulate the masses and control their choices. He fingered the labor leader Richard Trumka and these others, as described thusly by Media Matters:

•Propagandist and ad man Edward Bernays, who revolutionized 20th century public relations.

•Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, who was Bernays' uncle and influenced his method.

•George Soros, who Beck claimed shared Freud and Bernays' philosophy that people are "animals" who can be "experimented with."

•Cass Sunstein, who Beck insisted "is Edward Bernays" and has called "the most dangerous man in America."

•Former SEIU president Andy Stern, who Beck said is part of a self-proclaimed "intelligent minority" of powerful men trying to manipulate the "bewildered herd" of America.

•Walter Lippman, a prominent columnist of the mid-20th century, who Beck accused of viewing government "as a way to control people."

•Frances Fox Piven, professor at CUNY, who Beck accused of "sowing the seeds" of revolution.

•Ed Rendell, the governor of Pennsylvania, who Beck said thinks of himself as "one of the elites that are there to guide the herd."

Respectively, they are a leader in public relations; finance and philanthropy; psychiatry; law; labor; journalism; social theory; political public service.

A pretty diverse lot, these eight, it appears- except for one thing: they're all Jewish. Beck managed to find nine indomitable villains- and eight of nine are Jewish!

Beck accuses Piven of a plan to "intentionally collapse our economic system," as he has put it, putting her, as a Beck critic has charged, in "actual physical danger of a violent response." Still, we should not hyperventilate about prejudices, even if they're toward blacks and Jews.

Or maybe not. Last July the San Francisco Chronicle reported

Convicted felon Byron Williams loaded up his mother's Toyota Tundra with guns, strapped on his body armor and headed to San Francisco late Saturday night with one thing in mind: to kill workers at the American Civil Liberties Union and an environmental foundation, prosecutors say.

Williams, an anti-government zealot on parole for bank robbery, had hoped to "start a revolution" with the bloodshed at the ACLU and the Tides Foundation in San Francisco, authorities said.

But before he made it to the city, Williams was stopped at early Sunday by California Highway Patrol officers for speeding and driving erratically on westbound Interstate 580 west of Grand Avenue in Oakland.

Police say he then initiated a chaotic, 12-minute gunbattle with officers, firing a 9mm handgun, a .308-caliber rifle and a shotgun. He reloaded his weapons when he ran out of ammunition and stopped only after officers shot him in areas of his body not covered by his bullet-resistant vest, authorities said.

On Tuesday, Williams, 45, of Groveland (Tuolumne County) appeared in an Oakland courtroom on charges that he tried to murder four CHP officers. Authorities described him as a heavily armed man determined not to return to prison. Bullets from the suspect's rifle could penetrate ballistic body armor and vehicles, police said.

In October, Media Matters' John Hamilton conducted with Mr. Williams an interview which included this transaction:

MEDIA MATTERS: When you talk about how conservative values have been lost in this country you were talking before about the liberal media. You were saying maybe Fox was the exception. You think Fox is worthwhile?

BYRON WILLIAMS: Well, I'm not gonna say anyone is worthwhile. But [unintelligible] I would've never started watching Fox if it wasn't for the fact that Beck was on there. And it was the things that he did, it was the things he exposed that blew my mind. I said, well, nobody does this.

Hamilton adds that Williams identified "other media figures -- right-wing propagandist David Horowitz, and Internet conspiracist and repeated Fox News guest Alex Jones -- as key sources of information to inspire his 'revolution.'"

In June, blathering on about something else, Beck warned his listeners "You’re going to have to shoot them in the head. But warning, they may shoot you.... they're revolutionaries. Nancy Pelosi, those are the people you should be worried about."

Unsurprisingly, Williams insisted to Media Matters' Hamilton, Glenn Beck is "like a schoolteacher on TV." Unfortunately, a very good one.

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