Oh, you value the common good? NAZI!

After seeing a billboard a couple weeks back advertising Glenn Beck’s radio show (move over Rush, this guy gets FM), I decided to tune into 98.9, “The Big Talker,” yesterday.  You should tune in just once, so you can hear Beck’s promo clip, in which some sultry woman describes Beck as the “fusion of entertainment and enlightenment.”  Uh oh.  I listened on, and discovered that Beck was in unfortunately common form as he associated the concept of the “common good” with the ramp up to Nazism.  I didn’t catch what had set him off so much; it could have been Kagan, or Obama’s criticism of BP, or the latest perceived threats to his enormous ego.  But yesterday the common good was taking a beating.

According to now Dr. Beck (big surprise, Liberty), the rhetoric of the common good was an essential factor in moving Germany towards its extermination of undesirables like the mentally ill, the elderly, homosexuals, and, of course, European Jews.  Or rather, growth-towards-Nazism is an essential element of the “common good.”  Beck’s understanding of the efficient causes of the European genocide change pretty much everyday, but tend to drag a decent concept through mud every time.  The obvious irony is that yesterday Beck was appealing to the common good in all but name for virtually all of his pleas to save America.

It wasn’t very long after his tirade against the common good that he again attacked churches that preach “social justice,” and this time he lashed out at Jim Wallis.

Needless to say, it was one of those hysterical moments that ends up being cripplingly depressing.  I had to watch this video (again) to take the edge off.

• Glenn Beck