I finished the Real Time podcast on the way to work this morning. Toward the end, the discussion turns to Glenn Beck at Fox News and how dangerous he is. Dangerous as in comparing him and his new hit show to Timothy McVeigh and to the guy who shot up a Tennessee church. Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch were also singled out and called irresponsible for putting him on the air. Since Beck is saying the same kind of stuff on Fox as he did on Headline News, I guess that makes CNN irresponsible as well? Unbelievable.

And what’s really odd about this is that Bill Maher, who speaks about legalizing drugs on just about every show, and Glenn Beck pretty much agree on that issue. You also won’t find Beck as any great defender of President Bush over the past eight years. Here’s an excerpt from a Daily Beast interview with Beck from a few days ago:

How angry does it make you that AIG is using our money to pay $165 million in bonuses to their ill-begotten executives?
It makes me insane because George Bush shouldn’t have given that money to AIG in the first place. Now we have to care about what their contracts with their people say. Now I’m mad at George Bush and Barney Frank and Chris Dodd making this deal. But I can’t believe that Barack Obama wants to break the contract. What are you talking about? You’ve got a contract. Now if that’s what the government is going to do, saying that they have the right to terminate contracts, well, you’ve got to shut the pie hole on it. It’s one or the other. You can’t just start breaking contracts. If you want to do that, that’s why you let businesses fail.
It’s not our contract with AIG, the people’s contract with AIG. It’s AIG’s contracts with its executives.
They made those deals with their employees. How could you possibly back out of the AIG contract because it’s popular? It’s a legal contract.
You’ve also come out for the legalization of marijuana if, under the circumstances, we’re not going to enforce the marijuana laws federally, is that right?
You know what I can’t stand? I can’t stand inconsistency. It’s not about politics for me, it’s about consistency. If we have a problem with drugs at the border, and we’re not going to seriously take on the user, and we’re not going to enforce our own borders, well then, what are we doing?
Would you extend that to other controlled substances?
Look, I’m a libertarian. The problem is that we are so far away from being a society that understands self-regulation, it would be an absolute meltdown at this point. We’re going in the wrong direction. We’ve got to wean ourselves off of government and start regulating ourselves. That’s the same thing with the free-market system. You let people live with the results, good or bad. It’ll fix itself.

What really scares the pants off of liberals when you mention Glenn Beck is how fast his show on Fox has become a hit. (Actually, it’s how fast liberals realized he’s a hit. His audience has existed and has been developed over many years.) He’s not a predictable conservative, but a libertarian. And his libertarian views are appealing to a type of voter that Democrats have been courting since 2006. The left even invented a new term for these voters called “Libertarian Democrats.” The problem, of course, is that this new Libertarian Democrat is attracted much more to Glenn Beck’s philosophy on government that President Obama’s and unless liberals can kill the Glenn Beck baby in the bassinet, he’s going to be a factor in the 2010 and 2012 election.