The fruit of the wingnut vine

It's not just Glenn Beck.

No, above, we have the darling of the unhinged right's conspiracy-theorist section singing the praises of perennial presidential candidate and prominent "birther" Alan Keyes.

And Alan Keyes has got that Glenn Beck religion. Or is it that Glenn Beck has that Alan Keyes religion? Let's just say they both have that W. Cleon Skousen religion.

Watch.

I'LL BET the Catholic Keyes was surprised to find out that having that old-time Skousen religion . . . makes him a pretty hardline Mormon.

On the other hand, the Mormon-convert Beck has no such problem.

Which is good, because Beck loves the works of Skousen, who viewed the world through the eccentric lens of Mormon theology and saw a grand conspiracy of the "super rich" and the communists, working toward a "one-world order." To that end, the State Department handed Eastern Europe to the communists after World War II, and we abandoned China to Mao Zedong.

IT'S ALL those damned "secret combinations." The Rockefellers are selling us out to the commies, and ol' Dwight Eisenhower was a comsymp, too. Ike gave Cuba away to the Russkies after forcing Fidel Castro onto the Cuban people, who didn't want him.

Hell, don't you know that it was Harry Hopkins -- that longtime adviser to Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman -- who gave the Russians not only the plans for the atom bomb, but a cache of enriched uranium, too?

What, you don't know that? Obviously, you've been "brainwashed." So said Skousen in 1976, when the above recording was made.

And this brings us full circle to Glenn Beck, from earlier this month:

OY VEH. Swords into plowshares as a communist plot. Isaiah must have been part of a secret combination.

And then there's this, from today. W. Cleon Skousen, no doubt, would be so proud:

IF THE MASTER can come up with "Harry Hopkins gave the Russkies the Bomb," why can't the student come up with something as piddling as "Barack Obama hates the Constitution?"

There's a little problem though. Why in the world wouldn't the nation's first African-American president judge that the original document -- which not only did nothing to abolish slavery but went so far as to count slaves and Indians under U.S. jurisdiction as three-fifths of a person for apportioning purposes -- was objectively flawed in some way?

And, in fact, President Obama went on to expound upon the flaws. And Beck's staff at Fox News Channel edited that out -- rather badly, actually. I could hear the edits.

I'll take my leave by posting the unedited version of Obama's remarks. Glenn Beck and Fox News: Fair and balanced? You decide.