'Social justice' rears its ugly head

I guess if you're Glenn Beck or one of his disciples, you'll look at this dispatch from India and wonder why these commie-pinko protesters weren't just shot in the street.

That's right, according to the Zenit news agency, the dreaded social-justice conspiracy has set its sights on subverting The Way Things Work in the world's second-largest country:

Numerous religious, including three bishops, were arrested for taking part in a demonstration near Chennai in defense of the rights of Christian and Muslim "untouchables."

The police detained hundreds of people on Friday including priests, nuns, Archbishop Malayappan Chinnappa of Madras and Mylapore, Archbishop Peter Fernando of Madurai, and bishop Anthonisamy Neethinathan of Chinglepet, UCANews reported.

Friday's manifestation was the culmination of a month-long demonstration in favor of the lowest social caste, known as the dalits or untouchables.

The objective was to make the population and the state authorities more aware of the marginalization suffered by members of this class of society.

Thousands of people participated in a march that spanned some 310 miles, beginning a month earlier in the southern city of Kanyakumari.

HELL, IF YOU'RE the crew-cutted one, you're probably wondering -- in between crying jags -- not only why the noble Indian authorities didn't shoot the Catholic bishops, but why they didn't drive a stake through their hearts as well.

It's tough being Glenn Beck. If only enough people could see . . . it's all so clear once you're actually inside the funhouse mirror.

The devil has a crew cut

It's no secret that Glenn Beck is a cynical buffoon whose stock-in-trade is scaring the crap out of people even more ignorant and crazy than himself.

It also is no secret that Beck's boss at the Fox News Channel, Roger Ailes -- as well as his bosses at Premiere Radio Networks -- just might be the most cynical people in America. That's saying something.

But cynically ginning up outrage and paranoia among ignorant (and perhaps unstable) people is nothing new in American politics and public discourse. Dangerous, yes. Destructive of the commonweal, yes.

But, alas, nothing new. This is the tired and hoary work of minor demons inhabiting middling rings of the inferno.

CONVINCING GULLIBLE and paranoid Yankee Doodle whack jobs that "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land" is pure, uncut communism -- evil incarnate under the guise of "social justice" . . . collectivist subversion of freedom and democracy -- that, on the other hand, is the work of Lucifer himself.

The devil is on Fox News weekday afternoons at 5 -- 4 Central. His stage name is Glenn Beck.

And the devil -- er, "Beck" -- is a master at getting mere mortals to mistake good for evil and evil for a public-policy prescription.

"Blessed are you who are now hungry, for you will be satisfied"? Socialist redistribution of wealth!

"Blessed are you who are now hungry, for you will be satisfied"? Commie-libs are out to destroy individual initiative . . . by confiscating your income!

"Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation"? Implicit threat of violence against hard-working American achievers from totalitarian agitators in the highest ranks!

Woe to you who are filled now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will grieve and weep? If you remember your history, this sounds awfully like what Stalin did when he collectivized agriculture in the Ukraine! Communists want you to starve while they redistribute your food!

CALL IT biblical exegesis, as seen on Glenn Beck's TV. And heard on his radio.

Glenn Beck thinks that if you go to a church that believes that Jesus Christ meant what he said in the Beatitudes, you are in deep borscht, Comrade.

And Glenn Beck says red-blooded, market-oriented American lovers of freedom had better get out of any church that believes in that "social justice" crapola. No, really:

I recently received word through a new friend that The New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good captured audio of Fox News’ Glenn Beck encouraging listeners to leave their church if it proclaims a concern for social justice on his March 2nd radio broadcast. Here’s the quote from Beck:

"I'm begging you, your right to religion and freedom to exercise religion and read all of the passages of the Bible as you want to read them and as your church wants to preach them . . . are going to come under the ropes in the next year. If it lasts that long it will be the next year. I beg you, look for the words 'social justice' or 'economic justice' on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!"

NO, PEOPLE, this is no everyday, happens-every-couple-or-three-decades, run of the mill American political and cultural crackpottery.

What we have here is a crew-cut, whackadoodle Mormon-convert antichrist who has been given free reign by his radio and cable-TV masters to preach apostasy to millions of lost sheep. This isn't Christopher Hitchens going on TV to tell a bemused reporter that there is no God, and believers are full of beans.

Instead, this is one of the most popular hosts on the most popular cable-"news" channel, telling his viewers that Jesus preached evil, historical Christianity is a bunch of socialist agitprop and they should flee any church that believes in such things, because that church is a clear and present danger to the republic.

It's kind of like Lenin through the looking glass, actually.

A pretty neat trick, if you can pull it off. And we know just the malevolent entity for the job, don't we?

Good luck with that one, SPJ

The Society of Professional Journalists has decided it's time to shut the barn door -- years and years after Mr. Ed trotted off to Hollywood.

In other words, SPJ has gotten an eyeful of Anderson Cooper pulling bloodied Haitian kids out of the middle of a rampaging mob (and depositing him a safe 20 feet from the rampaging mob, conveniently in front of the CNN camera), Robin Roberts running the ABC Adoption Agency and Sanjay Gupta as Marcus Welby, M.D., and suddenly couldn't tell anymore where the evening news ended and "Celebrity Rehab" (or something) began.

Now, if the networks just could have gotten Dave, Jay and Conan into Port-au-Prince, we really might have had something there.

FROM A press release the journalism organization put out today:

The Society of Professional Journalists applauds the efforts of all journalists in Haiti who are working tirelessly to report the aftermath of last week's devastating earthquake and the ensuing aftershocks. However, SPJ cautions journalists to avoid making themselves part of the stories they are reporting. Even in crises, journalists have a responsibility to their audiences to gather news objectively and to report facts.

"I think it's important for journalists to be cognizant of their roles in disaster coverage,” SPJ President Kevin Smith said. "Advocacy, self promotion, offering favors for news and interviews, injecting oneself into the story or creating news events for coverage is not objective reporting, and it ultimately calls into question the ability of a journalist to be independent, which can damage credibility."

Undoubtedly, journalists walk a fine line to balance their professional responsibilities with their humanity when covering disasters. SPJ does not nor would it ever criticize or downplay the humane acts journalists are performing in Haiti. But news organizations must use caution to avoid blurring the lines between being a participant and being an objective observer.

"No one wants to see human suffering, and reporting on these events can certainly take on a personal dimension. But participating in events, even with the intention of dramatizing the humanity of the situation, takes news reporting in a different direction and places journalists in a situation they should not be in, and that is one of forgoing their roles as informants," Smith said.

YOU KNOW, nobody's going to fault Cooper for trying to safeguard a child when all hell has broken loose. Frankly, I think what he did probably was insufficient.

Furthermore, no one whose humanity hasn't set sail for pleasanter climes is going to fault Roberts for checking up on that Haitian orphanage, or even for placing a call to worried adoptive parents back in the States. But if you're making that act of compassion the center of your story, it compromises both the journalism and the good deed.

It ain't brain surgery, and it doesn't require attending a graduate seminar on moral reasoning and crises.

Hell, Hoss. Jesus had it all nailed a couple of millennia ago. Check out Matthew 6:

1
"(But) take care not to perform righteous deeds in order that people may see them; otherwise, you will have no recompense from your heavenly Father.
2
When you give alms, do not blow a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets to win the praise of others. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward.
3
But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right is doing,
4
so that your almsgiving may be secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you.

TIME WAS that almost everyone understood the concept. Time was.

Perhaps today's journalists, after reading the SPJ missive, need to take a look at the Good Book -- if for no other reason than to assure themselves that folks just aren't making this s*** up.

Brit Hume: Christian jihadist?

Poor Brit Hume.

The retired Fox News Channel anchor offers an opinion on a talk show -- an opinion that happens to be one of the least crazy things said on Fox in the last five years -- and all the usual suspects act like he's some kind of Jesus-y Osama bin Laden.

And what was this crazy opinion that threatens not only Western religious tolerance but liberal democracy itself? It was this:

Tiger Woods will recover as a golfer. Whether he can recover as a person, I think, is a very open question and it's a tragic situation with him. I think he's lost his family. It's not clear to me whether he'll be able to have a relationship with his children. But the Tiger Woods that emerges once the news value dies out of this scandal, the extent to which he can recover seems to me depends on his faith. He’s said to be a Buddhist. I don't think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. So my message to Tiger would be, Tiger, turn your faith, to the Christian faith, and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.

WOW. If the republic cannot withstand a Christian going on television and saying (kinda awkwardly, actually) that he thinks poor, messed-up, ruined Tiger Woods might find solace, forgiveness and redemption in -- AAAIIIIIEEEEEE! -- Jesus Christ, you're looking at a country that not only won't survive but has no business surviving.

Especially when it's a country in which some faiths are more equal than others. I think it goes without saying that in the circles Keith Olbermann inhabits, a Muslim advocating for Muhammad would be just okely dokely. Even if it wasn't the preferred cup of tea for confirmed secularists.

I would wager that's because, when you get right down to it, the Keith Olbermanns and Dan Savages of the world are just culturally imperialistic enough to see Muslims as just "Other" enough (or perhaps as just primitive enough) to be utterly non-threatening, save the odd suicide bomber.

But Christians . . . there still are a lot of those in America, aren't there? And they're just a little too familiar -- one could be your next-door neighbor, for Madalyn Murray O'Hair's sake!

And if they all started taking that Jesus guy at His word -- and if they all actually started following His word -- why, the capitalist, materialist foundations of the modern consumerist-lemming state might crumble! And where would that leave MSNBC and its capitalist raison d'être?

Really, if people did as poor Brit Hume advised and started following the God, that might mean everybody couldn't be a god. And then Dan Savage not only would start to look as stupid and uncouth as he actually is, he'd also be out of business straightaway.

Which, ironically, probably would bring Olbermann and Savage to their knees.

HAT TIP: Our Sunday Visitor.

This . . . is f***in' CNN

Note: R-rated language
Because we're stupid -- and getting stupider by the day -- alleged news operations like CNN figure the road to ratings success is best navigated by the short bus.

ANDERSON COOPER and alleged comedienne Kathy Griffin are the ones in the back seat, smoking cigarettes and throwing spitballs. Their New Year's Eve performance (a return engagement of the "fool me twice" variety) blessedly escaped my notice until now but, alas, did not elude the gaze of The Canadian Press:

For the second straight year, comedian Kathy Griffin ushered in the new year by saying something vulgar on CNN.

During the network's live New Year's Eve broadcast from Times Square, Griffin was joking with co-host Anderson Cooper about how to pronounce the first name of "balloon boy" Falcon Heene when she mumbled something that sounded a little like "Falcon" and a lot like the F-word.

Cooper hung his head, shook it and said "You're terrible," before resuming his banter.

The network said in a statement Friday that it "regrets that profanity was used during our New Year's Eve coverage."

During the same show a year ago, Griffin gleefully shouted at a heckler in the crowd and made a joke implying that the man performed gay sex acts for a living.

CNN REGRETS Kathy Griffin's F-bomb like Al Sharpton regrets the persistence of racism among Caucasians. But for foul-mouthed X-listers and white folk behaving badly, we'd be paying precious little attention to either.

Otherwise, how do you explain the "news" outlet putting Griffin back on the air, on New Year's Eve, after this last year (and, yes, note the "blue" language here, too):

Here's $8 million. Please go away.

You heard it here first.

As I was saying last week, Lou Dobbs' departure from CNN was, shall we say, less than voluntary.

Lucrative, according to the New York Post, but not exactly "Mr. Independent's" idea:

CNN was so sick of Lou Dobbs, it gave him an $8 million severance package to leave, The Post has learned.

"They wanted him out," according to a source.

Dobbs, who a source said had a year and a half to go on his $12 million contract, shocked viewers last Wednesday by announcing he was quitting.

CNN boss Jonathan Klein and Dobbs, 64, had been publicly feuding over the kind of reporting Dobbs was doing on his show -- especially stories about illegal immigration and the anti-Obama "birther" movement, which contends the president was not born in Hawaii and is not an American citizen.

But it was not clear until now that CNN was willing to pay Dobbs so much money to leave.

"What they do is their business," Dobbs said yesterday. "I tried to accommodate them as best I could, but I've said for many years now that neutrality is not part of my being."

THUS, LADIES AND GERMS, we discover the key to prestige and financial success at The End of the World as We Know It -- screw up so badly, behave so outrageously, embarrass your employer so profoundly that the suits will pay you anything to just leave them the f*** alone.

Lou Dobbs was allowed by Cable News Network to sit in front of the camera and act like a lunatic -- a regular bomb-throwing Cassandra of Whack -- for a number of years, getting crazier by the day, and CNN did nothing more radical than a "tsk tsk" here and there.

Lou Dobbs publicly feuded with the president of the network, and nothing more happened than dueling fusillades of public statements and press leaks.

Lou Dobbs got his facts wrong again and again . . . and nothing happened.

BUT THEN, after Screwy Louie kind of calms down after his "birther" moment . . . only then does CNN finally decide it can't take it anymore. What, did the supply of crystal meth run low in the executive suite?

The next thing we know, Dobbs is announcing his immediate departure from the network. And today, we find out he was paid off handsomely to go quietly.

How very Wall Street of everyone.

Of course, if you're a member of the middle or working class in this country nowadays, you don't have the freedom to act like a paranoid ass, screw up repeatedly and still keep your job. More than likely, your job is far from secure no matter how exemplary and talented an employee you might be.

And, more than likely, when you get the old heave-ho, not only will you not walk out of the building with a check for $8 million, but you'll be fortunate indeed if you can box up your personal effects before security escorts you off the premises.

No, you have to fly high before you're issued a golden parachute . . . and the correlation between high fliers and high performance is, as they say, a construct that is no longer operative.

IN A PHONY COUNTRY with a flaky economy, it's always far better to be a well-heeled and self-styled "defender of the middle class" than an actual member of its shrinking ranks.

Life never has been fair, and it never will be. But this kind of nonsense just isn't sustainable. Never has been, never will be.

Ask Marie Antoinette.

Lou de Loop flies the coup

"Mr. Independent" really is now. Lou Dobbs quit CNN today to take his shtick elsewhere.

Where "elsewhere" is, we don't know yet. And neither does Dobbs -- at least that's what he's telling the public.

You have to wonder whether he's going to try -- now that he has no more "network supervision" (for what little that's worth) to worry about -- to out-Beck the sine qua nut of the airwaves, Fox News Channel's Glenn Beck. Well, if he's going to try, he's gonna need a megaphone the size of the one he just left behind.

WHICH IS ODD, given Dobbs' stated reasoning:

Over the past six months it’s become increasingly clear that strong winds of change have begun buffeting this country and affecting all of us, and some leaders in media, politics and business have been urging me to go beyond the role here at CNN and to engage in constructive problem solving as well as to contribute positively to the great understanding of the issues of our day. And to continue to do so in the most honest and direct language possible.

I’ve talked extensively with Jonathan Klein — Jon’s the president of CNN — and as a result of those talks, Jon and I have agreed to a release from my contract that will enable me to pursue new opportunities.

At this point, I’m considering a number of options and directions, and I assure you, I will let you know when I set my course. I truly believe that the major issues of our time include the growth of our middle class, the creation of more jobs, health care, immigration policy, the environment, climate change, and our military involvement, of course, in Afghanistan and Iraq.

TRANSLATION: I was fired.

Either that, or there's going to be a Dobbs '10 campaign for something. That would be interesting -- frightening, but interesting.

Still, you have to wonder what happened to Lou Dobbs. He used to be a straight-laced business reporter and anchor. And there was nothing wrong with his questioning politically correct orthodoxies about immigration, particularly that of the illegal variety.

But. . . .

Apparently, there wasn't anything Lou Dobbs couldn't take too far. As in Too Far. As in playing fast and loose with facts.

As in, sooner or later, lapsing into inflammatory rhetoric that -- in a saner day in TV news -- would have gotten him fired on the spot.

And then there was his whole fascination this year with Birtherism, and his refusal to drop the subject when it became painfully clear not only that President Obama was indeed born in Hawaii, but also that the Birthers (and by association, Dobbs) were a bunch of paranoid lunatics.

COME TO THINK OF IT, Lou Dobbs had been trying to out-Beck Glenn Beck even when Beck was just another radio talk-show blowhard.

Unfortunately for Lou, he lacked the blackboard, the tear ducts and the madman charisma to lead an armored division of nutwagons to ratings glory. Instead, Lou now has been relieved of his command.

Mobilizing the Unhinged Corps has fallen to a bolder general . . . a regular George Patton will lead that googly-eyed irregular army.

Because nobody out-Becks Glenn Beck. Enjoy oblivion, Lou; you earned it.

Best. Rant. Ever.

From Shepard Smith -- the Fox News Channel anchor who once said, on air, "This is America; we don't f***ing torture" -- comes the best rant ever. It's about death on a grill -- the Krispy Kreme bacon cheeseburger.

I'm with Shep. This may well be a sign of the Apocalypse.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Beck

Glenn Beck is the kind of deep thinker appreciated by the sort who call it "guts" when DJs play Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the U.S.A." when we're bombing the crap out of crazy Arab potentates.

Hold the phone. Glenn Beck was the "morning zoo" host in Louisville who was "proud to be an American" on April 15, 1986 -- and "emotionally exhausted" from listeners phoning in to say yay or nay about his playing "Khadafy Sucks" the morning after American warplanes blowed the Libyan dictator's compound up good.

It must have been the caller who wanted to send Libyans down a razor blade slide into a pool of alcohol.

THEN AGAIN, it might have just been the alcohol. And the pot. And the cocaine.

Whether Beck was tired or stoned that day, he was almost certainly depressed. Despite his creative freedom, local star status and high salary, Beck's mental state was on a slide. By his own telling, he was drinking heavily, snorting coke and entertaining thoughts of suicide. "There was a bridge abutment in Louisville, Kentucky, that had my name on it," Beck later wrote. "Every day I prayed for the strength to be able to drive my car at 70 mph into that bridge abutment. I'm only alive today because (a) I'm too cowardly to kill myself ... and (b) I'm too stupid."

AS SALON.COM tells us in a three-part series on Beck's life as one of radio's "morning zoo" bad boys, Fox News Channel's newest sensation and the de-facto leader of the Great American Freak Out has had a little experience in the "freak" department. From "Glenn Beck becomes damaged goods," Part 2 of Alexander Zaitchik's Beckian trilogy:

Beck's real broadcasting innovation during his stay in Kentucky came in the realm of vicious personal assaults on fellow radio hosts. A frequent target of Beck's in Louisville was Liz Curtis, obese host of an afternoon advice show on WHAS, a local AM news-talk station. It was no secret in Louisville that Curtis, whom Beck had never met and with whom he did not compete for ratings, was overweight. And Beck never let anyone forget it. For two years, he used "the big blonde" as fodder for drive-time fat jokes, often employing Godzilla sound effects to simulate Curtis walking across the city or crushing a rocking chair. Days before Curtis' marriage, Beck penned a skit featuring a stolen menu card for the wedding reception. "The caterer says that instead of throwing rice after the ceremony, they are going to throw hot, buttered popcorn," explains Beck's fictional spy.

Despite the constant goading, Curtis never responded. But being ignored only seemed to fuel Beck's hunger for a response. As his attacks escalated and grew more unhinged, a WHAS colleague of Curtis' named Terry Meiners decided to intervene. He appeared one morning unannounced at Beck's small office, which was filled with plaques, letters and news clippings -- "a shrine to all that is Glenn Beck," remembers Meiners. He told Beck to lay off Curtis, suggesting he instead attack a morning DJ like himself, who could return fire. "Beck told me, 'Sorry, all's fair in love and war,'" remembers Meiners. "He continued with the fat jokes, which were exceedingly cruel, pointless, and aimed at one of the nicest people in radio. Glenn Beck was over-the-top childish from Day One, a punk who tried to make a name for himself by being disruptive and vengeful."

NICE GUY. But not as "nice" as he'd get in Phoenix, where he took the "morning zoo" shtick after getting canned in the Bluegrass State:

Beck and Hattrick began their show far behind Kelly's market-leading show on KZZP. As they continued to get clobbered, Beck grew obsessed with getting his name on the leading station. His first attempt to get Kelly to mention him on the air came shortly after his arrival. "I walked out to get the paper one Saturday morning," remembers Kelly. "When I turned around, I saw that my entire house was covered in Y95 bumper stickers. The windows, the garage doors, the locks -- everything. But I refused to mention Beck's name on the air, which drove him nuts."

Beck kept trying. When KZZP's music director held his marriage at a Phoenix church, Beck loaded up Y95's two Jeeps with boxes of bumper stickers and drove to the ceremony. As the service was coming to a close, Beck and his team ran crouching from car to car, slapping bumper stickers on anything with a fender. The service ended while Beck was running amok, and the KZZP morning team appeared just in time to see Beck jump into his getaway car. "Beck saw me standing in the way of the exit and gunned right for me. I threw a landscaping rock on his windshield and blocked him," says Kelly. When his old friend demanded he roll down the window, Beck reluctantly obliged. Kelly then unloaded a mouthful of spit in his face.

"Glenn Beck was the king of dirty tricks," says Guy Zapoleon, KZZP's program director. "It may seem mild in retrospect, but at the time that wedding prank was nasty and over the line. Beck was always desperate for ratings and attention."

The animosity between Beck and Kelly continued to deepen. When Beck and Hattrick produced a local version of Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" for Halloween -- a recurring motif in Beck's life and career -- Kelly told a local reporter that the bit was a stupid rip-off of a syndicated gag. The slight outraged Beck, who got his revenge with what may rank as one of the cruelest bits in the history of morning radio. "A couple days after Kelly's wife, Terry, had a miscarriage, Beck called her live on the air and says, 'We hear you had a miscarriage,' " remembers Brad Miller, a former Y95 DJ and Clear Channel programmer. "When Terry said, 'Yes,' Beck proceeded to joke about how Bruce [Kelly] apparently can't do anything right -- about he can't even have a baby."

"It was low class," says Miller, now president of Open Stream Broadcasting. "There are certain places you just don't go."

"Beck turned Y95 into a guerrilla station," says Kelly. "It was an example of the zoo thing getting out of control. It became just about pissing people off, part of the culture shift that gave us 'Jackass.'" Among those who were appalled by Beck's prank call was Beck's own wife, Claire, who had been friends with Kelly's wife since the two worked together at WPGC.

Their friendship soured, Beck continued with the stunts, some of which won the competition's begrudging admiration. The most elaborate and successful of these neatly throws a double-spotlight on both the juvenile nature of morning radio competition and the culture of pop cheese in which Beck marinated for 20 years.

Toward the end of Beck's time in Phoenix, KZZP sponsored a free Richard Marx concert at the Tempe El Diablo stadium in downtown Phoenix. Marx was at the time riding high on a triple-platinum album, and the show was a monster publicity coup for Beck's rival. But Beck was in no mood to let KZZP bask in the concert's glow without a fight. He and Hattrick arrived at the stadium early on the night of the show and gave the sound technician $500 to play a prerecorded Y95 promo moments before KZZP's Bruce Kelly was scheduled to announce the show. As an audience of nearly 10,000 waited for the show to begin, the KZZP mics were cut and Beck's voice suddenly boomed out of the stadium's sound system: "The Y95 Zoo team is proud to present … Richard Marx!" As soon as he heard his name, an oblivious Marx walked onto the stage and began to play. As the KZZP crew stood stunned offstage, scattered Y95 agents popped up and began throwing "Y95 Zoo" T-shirts in every direction to a cheering crowd.

"It was brilliant," remembers Kelly, who gave Beck his first lessons in the art of publicity. "Totally brilliant. He nailed us."

BECK THEN LEFT for Houston, where complete failure awaited. And then he drifted to Baltimore, where the drink and drugs tightened their hold . . . and more rating failure was in the cards.

One former colleague painted him, in those Baltimore days, as a drugged-out Marquis de Sade:

Beck was known at B104 as a pro's pro in the studio but was becoming increasingly unraveled when not working. "Beck used to get hammered after every show at this little bar-café down the street," remembers a music programmer who worked with Beck. "At first we thought he was going to get lunch." The extent to which Beck was struggling to keep it together is highlighted by Beck's arrest one afternoon just outside Baltimore. He was speeding in his DeLorean with one of the car's gull-wing doors wide open when the cops pulled him over. According to a former colleague, Beck was "completely out of it" when a B104 manager went down to the station to bail him out. In his 2003 book, "Real America," Beck refers to himself as a borderline schizophrenic. Whether that statement is matter-of-fact or intended for effect, he has spoken more than once about taking drugs for ADHD, and when he was at B104, Beck's coworkers believed him to be taking prescription medication for some kind of mental or psychological ills. "He used to complain that his medication made him feel like he was 'under wet blankets,'" remembers the former music programmer.

Today, when Beck wants to illustrate the jerk he used to be, he tells the story of the time he fired an employee for bringing him the wrong pen during a promotional event. According to former colleagues in Baltimore, Beck didn't just fire people in fits of rage -- he fired them slowly and publicly. "He used to take people to a bar and sit them down and just humiliate them in public. He was a sadist, the kind of guy who rips wings off of flies," remembers a colleague.

EVENTUALLY, Beck sobered up after his marriage fell apart. Eventually, he shopped around for a worldview, became a Mormon and married anew. And he discovered talk radio in New Haven, Conn.:

By 1998, Beck realized he'd never be able to do what he wanted to do on FM radio, limited to talking fluff in between Britney Spears songs. Out of this failed experiment with Penn was born Beck's idea of "fusing" morning radio wackiness and political debate.

His talk radio identity still larval, Beck was already displaying the skills that would make him a talk-radio lightning rod. "He always knew how to work people and situations for attention," says Penn. "He could pick the most pointless story in the news that day and find a way to approach it to get phones lit up. That was his strong point -- pissing people off. He was very shrewd on both the business and entertainment sides of radio. He's built his empire on very calculated button pushing."

Not that this empire was imaginable back then. Mostly people noticed the button-pushing and wanted nothing to do with it.

"Anyone in Connecticut who says they knew Beck was destined to run an entertainment empire is full of s***," says one of Beck's former coworkers in New Haven. "The guy had dozens of enemies. People thought he was an annoying, washed-up has-been. When I see people today bragging that they knew him back then, I'm like, 'But you f****** hated him!'"

TODAY, WE FIND that Beck has pushed buttons all the way to the head of an "army" of the gullible disaffected. He has national radio and cable-news shows, and his devotees sing his praises at Washington rallies and use his words as brickbats against the dastardly "progressives."

Only in America. Or maybe Munich.

Of course, no one wants to discount the idea of redemption. No one wants to dismiss the power of God, and the power of the human spirit, to turn around a life.

No one wants to seriously believe that people cannot change -- sometimes quite fundamentally. I'd like to believe that of Glenn Beck.

It's hard, though, when the man refuses to give others the same benefit of the doubt that he demands of us. He vilifies Van Jones for a colorful political past, yet we are expected to give a former sadistic, washed-up and drugged-out disc jockey not only a pass, but also the keys to a populist uprising.

We're supposed to take his TV and radio shows seriously, and we're not supposed to think those who do are imbeciles with a tenuous grip on reality.

That's a tall order. Especially when Beck takes to the national airwaves to point out communist symbology at Rockefeller Center and the United Nations . . . all allegedly courtesy of the Rockefellers.

It's just as crazy as Beck stating that the entire concept of social justice is somehow inextricably intertwined with communist ideology. Talk like that shouldn't be taken seriously, unless the subject at hand centers on whether America's hottest talker is as abstemious as his church demands.

Glenn Beck the rich and popular talk-show host may no longer be the same monster as "Captain" Beck, the morning-zoo DJ. But that monster still lurks somewhere within (as, to be fair, it does for all of us).

And the more Mr. Hyde can manage to emerge from Beck's new, respectable Dr. Jekyll persona -- the one with the audience of millions -- the safer it becomes for all our nation's darkest demons to seek the spotlight once again.

Blind cable channel finds acorn, drops F-bomb

Mrs. Favog is always getting on me about the F-word. She contends there is no proper use of "fudge" (not its real name) except, of course, when she "fudges" up and lets it slip in the heat of the moment.

Just kidding. She's generally mortified she let it slip.

My lowdown, sinful self, however, contends that some uses of the F-bomb are wholly appropriate as a means of conveying gravity and figuratively slapping the listener in the face, shaking him by the lapels and saying "Listen, dammit!" Of course, 99 percent of my personal use of "fudge" is completely gratuitous and, thus, unjustifiable.

EVERY NOW AND AGAIN, though, you run up against a completely justified F-bomb. Shepard Smith just accidentally unleashed one when discussing America's official torture program on the Fox News Channel.

Unfortunately for Shep, it was on live television. Fortunately for Shep, it was on cable TV, so it's not going to cost his bosses a big-time FCC fine.

And fortunately for viewers and connoisseurs of journalism, Shep's performance means there might be hope for "Faux News" after all.

But if Shepard Smith's head does roll due to his on-camera performance, you have to wonder whether it would be over a heaping helping of "fudge" . . . or because he came out foursquare against torturing in the name of God, Mom, apple pie and Chevrolet.


HAT TIP: Your Right Hand Thief.

Analyzing cable's coverage of Ike

As we watch, for the 400th time, the "new video" of cars creeping around debris on Texas roads today in the wake of Hurricane Ike -- both in stand-alone mode and in multiple frames on the TV screen -- it reminds us cable news is almost as good a parody of itself as was the most devastatingly funny send up of television news ever.

That would be Saturday Night Live's "death of Buckwheat" sketch from March 1983.

All that needs to be said about television news got said 25 years ago. Enjoy.