Free Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America by Dana Milbank Page A

driven to madness by a caller from Massachusetts, of all places,” Beck said on his TV show one evening. “Here he is.”
    The picture switched to … Glenn Beck! In shirtsleeves, doing his radio show.
    “Where is your logic?” a caller named Kathy is asking him. “What would you do? I’m asking you, what would you do to change this health-care system for the better? After all, every time you people bring up cost, you don’t care about the trillions of dollars to bail out the banks and all the credit card companies.”
    At this, Beck explodes. “Kathy, get off my phone!” Beck is pumping his arms in the air maniacally. “Get off my phone, you little pinhead! I don’t care? You people don’t care about the trillions?” Beck slips into a high-pitched screech. “I’m going to lose my mind today,” he shrieks.
    “That’s shameful,” the TV version of Beck said when the clip ended. Then, as he announced himself as his official guest, an image of the radio version of Beck appeared on the split screen, wearing a sweatshirt and a “TF” baseball cap for Bill O’Reilly’s show, The Factor .
    “Thank you for finally having somebody who disagrees with you, you know, on the air once in a while,” Radio Beck told TV Beck.
    “A lot of people say you’ve lost your mind,” TV Beck said to Radio Beck.
    “You know, I have lost my mind,” Radio Beck said. “You know, what’s the difference between me and you, you know what I mean? I’ve lost my mind. You’re a big fat fatty. You’re on TV all the time. But yes, I lost my mind. You know, are you watching the news? … I mean, the whole country is melting down. People aren’t even paying attention.”
    An understanding TV Beck replied, “And that’s why you were screaming ‘get off my phone’ to that lady because she wasn’t paying attention?”
    “Yes,” Radio Beck volleyed. “I think yelling at people and then hanging up on them is the only real way to save America at this point … Doing that to one person every day—it’s not enough,” Radio Beck continued, explaining that yelling at people should be worked into one’s daily routine. “You know, people are picking up a newspaper … What, are you crazy? ‘Get out of my newspaper!’ ”
    “You’re starting to sound a little nuts,” TV Beck informed his radio self.
    “Oh, I’m starting to sound crazy?” Radio Beck asked, offended.
    “Yeah, you are, just a little bit.”
    “I knew you’d say that,” crazy Radio Beck replied. “The magic bean in my pocket told me you would say that. Oh, I know who you are.”
    TV Beck moved to cut off the madman.
    “Get off my screen, you pinhead!” Radio Beck shrieked.
    It was pitch-perfect comedy, but the segment also said everything you need to know about Beck’s mental state. He may say and do crazy things, but that doesn’t mean he’s crazy.
    There are millions of Americans who fear their government, which usually makes them angry at their government. In Beck, they found somebody who will give voice to their paranoia.
    After Poland’s president was killed when his plane tried to land in fog in Russia, a caller to Beck’s radio show saw something darker. “Call me paranoid,” the caller said. (Okay, if you insist.) “I smell a rat in the destruction of the Polish government on that airplane.” The caller thought it might have been a plot by “the Ruskies.”
    Beck allowed the man to spin the conspiracy theory, then validated it. “I don’t put anything past a former KGB agent,” he said. “We are dealing with the powers of darkness … I don’t know if anybody had anything to do with this physically, but I’m telling you we are dealing with the powers of darkness in the world today.”
    But you don’t get three million viewers a night by merely validating existing paranoid delusions; you must also feed the paranoid new things to fret about. This is why Beck tells his viewers and listeners, day after day, that the