ANOTHER WINGNUT MEME SELF-DESTRUCTS

You may call that psycho Glenn Beck has promoted a modern "Thomas Paine" and Chris Kelly of HuffPo provided a little real information on the original that shows the current incarnation is an ill-informed imbecile. I went to the Encyclopedia Britannica and found a little more information. Paine was enraged by the attacks on the French Revolution by the great conservative writer Edmund Burke and wrote two rebuttals, The Rights of Man and The Rights of Man, Part II.¹ In these works, Paine advocated was can only be called a defense of liberalism:

What began as a defense of the French Revolution evolved into an analysis of the basic reasons for discontent in European society and a remedy for the evils of arbitrary government, poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, and war. Paine spoke out effectively in favour of republicanism as against monarchy and went on to outline a plan for popular education, relief of the poor, pensions for aged people, and public works for the unemployed, all to be financed by the levying of a progressive income tax.

¹Paine, Thomas. (2009). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved April 19, 2009, from Encyclopædia Britannica Online: http://search.eb.com/eb/article-260408