Ellis Washington’s latest Glenn Beck-like screed just leaves me scratching my head wondering what alternate reality he lives in. It surely isn’t the one we live in. It opens with this mind-blowing statement:

Communism in America was exposed in a 1958 book by conservative writer Cleon Skousen, “Naked Communist.” State capitalism, Federal Reserve, federal taxes, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unionism, welfare statism (subsidies) and pension plans, are examples of the thousands of treasonous Ponzi schemes and slush funds politicians have used since the 1850s to dumb down society, buy votes and broker power.

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Yes, this one should make you do a spit take:

Fox News host Glenn Beck said Friday night that Donald Trump has been making him “a little uncomfortable recently” with some of the wilder claims he’s made about President Barack Obama.

There should be a word for the look one gets when they read something like that.

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From the increasingly insane Glenn Beck:

“If this president is re-elected In 2012, there is no way we as a nation survive in any form that we understand.”

I am perpetually amused by the right’s attempts to make Obama out to be some crazy, way out of the mainstream, radical politician. He is nothing of the kind. He is a firmly centrist politician and he proves that every single day. And at this point, the center means endorsing policies that eviscerate the Bill of Rights and our credibility in enforcing the very treaties we advocated for in decades past.

Though she still maintains that she’s waiting to hear from God directly, Rep. Michele Bachmann is clearly working toward running for president in 2012. And she gave what may have been her first real stump speech of the campaign in South Carolina the other day. My colleague Andy Birkey reports on some of the whoppers in that speech.

“If Obama is allowed to continue what I call his ‘reign of error’ for another second term, we will be at $21 trillion in debt,” she said. “We are talking Greece territory in the greatest country in the world. We are talking Greece.”

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One of Sarah Palin’s closest confidants, Frank Bailey, has written a manuscript for a tell-all book that was leaked to the press a few days ago. And the allegations in it probably won’t shock anyone.

The unpublished book by Frank Bailey was leaked to the media and widely circulated on Friday.

The manuscript opens with an account of Palin sending Bailey a message saying “I hate this damn job” shortly before she resigned as Alaska’s governor in July 2009, less than three years into her four-year term. The manuscript goes on for nearly 500 pages, a mixture of analysis, gossip and allegation.

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This video is actually a few months old but I somehow missed it at the time. It’s Gen. Jerry Boykin, the retired wingnut general who was reprimanded for declaring that we were in a holy war against Islam. He’s the general who led the operation that the movie Blackhawk Down deals with. He’s one of the looniest men you’ll ever see and this video shows why.

By the way, Boykin just went on Glenn Beck’s show. And he is one of the speakers at the upcoming Values Voters Summit, so once again the right wing treats someone certifiably nutso as a credible expert and pushes them from the fringe into the mainstream.

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For the second year in a row Ron Paul won the CPAC presidential straw poll with 30% of the vote. Mitt Romney was second with 23%. That doesn’t mean he’s going to win the nomination, of course — he won’t — but I think it is more evidence that there is a serious split on the right that can be exploited by the left.

With the rise of the Tea Party movement the right seemed unified in 2010, if only by their hatred of Barack Obama. But now that the election is over and actual governing has to begin, the deep divisions that were papered over by anti-Obama fervor are starting to come to the fore.
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Conor Friedersdorf does a masterful job of taking down the ridiculous David Horowitz, who has been attempting to defend Glenn Beck for his monumentally idiotic claim that Muslims and “leftists” are part of a grand conspiracy to take America down. First he quotes this from Horowitz:

Bill Kristol is entitled to his optimism about democratic revolutions in the Islamic world. Perhaps the elections in Egypt will turn out better than those in Gaza where Hamas now rules a terrorist state; Iraq, which has instituted an Islamic Republic; Lebanon, where Hezbollah now rules a terrorist state; and Afghanistan, which is a kleptocracy wooing the terrorist theocracy in Iran. What he should not be doing as a conservative leader is demonizing Glenn Beck, who has done more to educate Americans about the unholy alliance between the secular left and the Islamic jihadists than anyone else. Kristol needs to apologize to Beck for comparing him — outrageously — to the conspiracist Robert Welch, and should be embarrassed by his own ignorance of the agendas of both American radicals and their jihadist allies. At this point in time, such ignorance is not only inexcusable but dangerous.

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From law professor Ann Althouse in a Bloggingheads debate:

“Justice Holmes said a long time ago that the best test of the truth is its ability to get accepted in the marketplace of ideas. Glenn Beck has gotten very far in the marketplace of ideas. If he’s so wrong, where is the speech on the other side showing him to be wrong?”

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Gawker has a list of some of the crazier right wing reactions to the situation in Egypt. I think my favorite is from Glenn Beck:

“The entire Mediterranean is on fire. More than that, it’s not just the surrounding countries of the Mediterranean; it also spreads up here — you have the U.K. and Ireland already with riots in the street… I think there is a chance that Tunisia is our Archduke Ferdinand moment… He was the guy assassinated in Sarajevo, June 1914. A month later, Austria and Hungary declared war against Serbia and the rest is called World War I. I believe a snowball is being formed, and it is starting to roll… You can at least prepare to not get caught in the snowball. I’m going to show you in a minute how this isn’t Berlin. This is Iran, 1979.”

First it’s World War I, then it’s the Iranian revolution. Because those are so similar. I think Beck is playing world history mad libs.

Here’s video of Megyn Kelly declaring that Fox News hosts never compare Obama, Democrats or liberals to Hitler or the Nazis.

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