ZAITCHIK IS NO CHAFETS

Chafets fellated Fats Limbaugh but Zaitchik isn't whitewashing Glenn Beck. David Wiegel interviewed Zaitchik for the WaPo and here are a few of the juicier tidbits:

Does he really believe God is speaking to and through him? I don’t know. But in one of his books, he describes Heaven as a place where everybody “can make as much money as they want,” and he does believe that God basically wrote the Constitution in 1787.

Beck has a long history of attacking other people’s kids. In the past, he’s even attacked fetuses. In Phoenix in the mid-1980s, he once called the wife of a rival deejay and mocked her live on the air about her recent miscarriage. In Tampa, he repeatedly called the second-marriage children of Michael Schiavo (husband of Terri) “bastard children.” The tic is just one of the many recurring manifestations of Beck’s molten mean-streak, which runs a mile deep and often explodes like a volcano.

I mean, this is a guy who thinks the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment is an urban legend.

I wish the left was better at resisting some of the bait he dangles on a daily basis, and focus on the bigger picture, like the agenda of [David and Charles] Koch-funded groups like Americans for Prosperity, which feeds Beck most of his scripts. That, and the content of the religious pseudo-histories he keeps telling people to read.

Aside from providing an introduction to Skousen, Mormonism is a perfect religious fit for Beck in a lot of ways, from the wealth-worshiping corporatism of the LDS Church, to the teary social ritual known as “bearing testimony,” to the schmaltzy sentimentalism found in so much Mormon film and literature. But those are each long stories in themselves.

Consider his Aug. 28 “Restoring Honor” rally. ... It’s a replay of his listener-supported “Rallies for America” tour in 2003, which exploded his profile while he was racking up affiliates and building his national brand. His fans just don’t get the fact that, as one of Beck’s former producers told me, “It’s always about Glenn.”