Glenn Beck admitted on his radio show the other day that he lied during his rally at the Lincoln Memorial when he claimed to have held the original handwritten copy of George Washington’s first inaugural address in his hands. His excuse is laughable:

Yesterday I went to the National Archives, and they opened up the vault, and they put on their gloves and then they put it on a tray. They wheeled it over and it’s all in this hard plastic and you’re sitting down at a table and you can’t, because of Sandy Berger, I had a long conversation with him about this, you can’t actually touch any of the documents, these are very very rare. So what they do, they have it in this plastic thing and they hold them right in front of you, you can’t touch them but then you can say ‘can you turn it over,’ and then they turn it over for you and then you look at it. I thought it was a little clumsy to explain it that way.

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With all of the talk from conservatives about Obama being viewed as the messiah in mind, take a look at this video of Glenn Beck declaring that his rally and the movement he’s trying to lead is on par with the American revolution and the end of slavery. Seriously:

Beck: This is the third Great American Awakening. There have been two. One started by George Whitfield, and it led to the American Revolution. The second one happened in the 1840s and ’50s, and it started with people of faith, of all faiths, and it led to the freeing of the slaves. This one is going to restore our Constitution. It’s going to restore individual responsibility. It’s going to restore faith, hope, and charity.

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Here’s a very amusing interview with a woman from the Glenn Beck rally last weekend, trying to answer the question of when American lost its honor. She starts by complaining about Rev. Wright, then declares him a Muslim. Then she claims that his whole life was preparing to run for president and that’s why he’s covering up his Muslim faith. But if that was the case, why would he have chosen to go to Rev. Wright’s church rather than a more mainstream church that would not be controversial? The mind boggles.

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As you’ve probably heard by now, Glenn Beck lied during his rally last weekend when he claimed to have held George Washington’s hand-written first inaugural address in his hand while touring the National Archives. Mother Jones has the quote:

Speechifying at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, the controversial Fox News host highlighted the legacy of the nation’s first president to drive home his claim that encouraging honesty and integrity was a main aim of the event. Beck even told attendees that “the next George Washington” was “in this crowd. He may be 8 years old, but this is the moment. This is the moment that he dedicates his life, that he sees giants around him. And 25 years from now, he will come not to this stair, but to those stairs. And he can proclaim, ‘I have a new dream.'”

Beck also invoked Washington while describing the inspiring experience of visiting famous tourist destinations around the nation’s capital. “I have been going to Mt. Vernon,” he explained. Holding out his hands for emphasis, he declared with emotion, “I went to the National Archives, and I held the first inaugural address written in his own hand by George Washington.”

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Crooks and Liars has an amusing side-by-side chart looking at the achievements of Glenn Beck vs the achievements of Martin Luther King, Jr. at various ages. Let’s just say that Beck doesn’t exactly stack up.

Christopher Hitchens may be dying of cancer but he has lost neither his gifts for observation nor his caustic wit. In his latest Slate column he takes a look at Glenn Beck’s rally on the 47th anniversary of MLK’s most luminous moment. He frames it first in terms of race:

One crucial element of the American subconscious is about to become salient and explicit and highly volatile. It is the realization that white America is within thinkable distance of a moment when it will no longer be the majority. This awareness already exists in places like New York and Texas and California, and there have even been projections of the time(s) at which it will occur and when different nonwhite populations will collectively outnumber the former white majority. But it also exerts a strong subliminal effect in states like Alaska that have an overwhelming white preponderance.

Until recently, the tendency has been to think of this rather than to speak of it–or to speak of it very delicately, lest the hard-won ideal of diversity be imperiled. But nobody with any feeling for the zeitgeist can avoid noticing the symptoms of white unease and the additionally uneasy forms that its expression is beginning to take.

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Driftglass at Crooks and Liars provides a brilliant image of Glenn Beck’s rally at the Lincoln Memorial:

Glenn Beck’s decision to start pushing Mormon history on his show has some of his usual supporters seeing red. Brannon Howse of the ultra-wingnut Worldview Matters didn’t like that at all:

On his radio show last week, Brannon Howse of Worldview Matters accused Glenn Beck of “bait and switch” tactics to bring Christians together into a coalition on shared goals and then draw them into Mormonism by using manipulative double language. “He’s setting up a conspiracy theory of hidden truths showing this to be a Mormon Christian country.”

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Bryan Fischer, the uber-wingnut spokesman for the American Family Association, is quite upset by Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck not being sufficiently bigoted against gays. Coulter accepted a speaking engagement for a gay Republican group, while Beck said he really doesn’t care about stopping same-sex marriage.

And Fischer, who wants the government to force gays and lesbians into “reparative therapy” or prison, is doing his usual dishonest framing and revealing his obsession with gay sex:
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Well known mental patient Glenn Beck appears to have extended his momentary glimpse of sanity, or he’s just trying to get on my good side. Gawker reports that on his radio show, Beck declared CNN’s Rick Sanchez to be “the dumbest man ever on television.” And I can’t really disagree. Sanchez was a breathtakingly bad reporter for CNN and he’s an even worse host now that he has his own show. It’s absolutely unwatchable.

I’d actually rather watch Beck or O’Reilly because at least crazy can be entertaining. This reminds me of the time Rush Limbaugh accurately called O’Reilly a modern day Ted Baxter — he may not be the right one to say it, but he was dead on with the description. So is Beck here. Sanchez is weapons grade stupid.

We had a brief moment of sanity from Glenn Beck last week when he told Bill O’Reilly that he doesn’t really care about same-sex marriage because it isn’t really going to change anything. He even quoted Thomas Jefferson’s famous “it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg” statement in doing so. Alas, that momentary lapse of crazy has his usual allies at the Worldnutdaily foaming at the mouth.

Joseph Farah declares that Beck’s statement proves that he “shares a materialistic worldview with Marx, Engels and Saul Alinksy.” Come on, Joe. Why not just add Jeffrey Dahmer and Adolf Hitler to the list? You know you want to.
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Glenn Beck continues to distort American history on his radio and TV shows. Media Matters caught him on his radio show ranting about the evils of the 17th amendment, which provided for direct election of senators rather than having them appointed by the state legislatures. And who does he blame this all on? Woodrow Wilson! Here’s the rant:

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