Conservative Food Fight: Kristol Vs. Beck

Glenn Beck’s week-long, paranoid, delusional rants about how jihadists will take over the entire Middle East and how they’re fueled by the American left has driven conservative Bill Kristol to strike back against this inane hysteria. (via Mediaite) Kristol writes in the Weekly Standard about his minor differences with fellow conservative Charles Krauthammer, takes an obligatory shot at the Obama administration, but then really lets Glenn Beck have it.

But hysteria is not a sign of health. When Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left, he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. He’s marginalizing himself, just as his predecessors did back in the early 1960s.

Nor is it a sign of health when other American conservatives are so fearful of a popular awakening that they side with the dictator against the democrats. Rather, it’s a sign of fearfulness unworthy of Americans, of short-sightedness uncharacteristic of conservatives, of excuse-making for thuggery unworthy of the American conservative tradition.

Beck’s desperate attempt to get ratings apparently involved appealing to the far-right by blaming the left for every imagined issue, to the point where his own conservative brethren see how ridiculous it is.

1. Groups from the hardcore socialist and Communist left and extreme Islam will work together because they are both a common enemy of Israel and the Jew.

2. Groups from the hardcore socialist and Communist left and extreme Islam will work together because they are the common enemy of capitalism and the western way of life.

3. Groups from the hardcore socialist and Communist left and extreme Islam will work to overturn relatively stable countries, because, in the status quo, they are both ostracized from power.

It’s taken Glenn Beck for me to embrace the views of Bill Kristol, at least on this one.

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.