Why Glenn Beck Needs to Be Repeatedly Cock-Punched (9/12 Edition): Let us say, and why not, that you are a gay male (and if you are, then you know how it goes). You're in bed just after fucking this hot guy you've been wanting, this cut, six-packed stud who is not only a willing and happy cocksucker, but a gleeful bottom to your cheery top. You've told all your friends that you've been wanting to fuck this dude, so much so that they're sick of hearing about it. You keep working out, getting yourself into the shape where you think you're hot enough to approach him at the Chelsea bar where you both regularly drink. You do it and he's into it. You go back to your place, the clothes come off, he's going down on you, and you realize, somewhere between the inability to know what to do with the balls and the misplaced feeling he has that repeatedly nibbling the tip of your penis is the most erotic thing in the world, that he doesn't know what the fuck he's doing, that the image you had of him was totally wrong. You eventually come, sure, but that's through pure concentration and effort on your part. You offer to do him, but he can't even really get it up, and you end up just chafing his shaft for a bit with a pity hand job. He blames the meds he's on. The 'roids, the antidepressants. But you can fuck him in the ass and maybe that'll help get him off. You're laying there in bed later, he's thinking he's kind of awesome, and you're wondering what the fuck you're gonna say about this fantasy guy. You've built him up and built him up in your mind and your friends. You could be honest, but then what does that say about your judgment? No, you decide, as he gets dressed 'cause he wants to hit the 24-hour gym for a 3 a.m. iron pumping, you're gonna say it was awesome, that this guy was all kinds of fucktoy, a life-changing lay. So it is that Glenn Beck, mad provocateur and advertiser-less Fox "news" charity case, is desperately (and creepily) trying to push that his tiny legion of deranged, racist senior citizens, rednecks, and abused children as a kind of nation-changing movement. On his "show" yesterday (if by "show," you mean, "a shameless sham of self-aggrandizement and fraud that'd make P.T. Barnum say, 'Are you shitting me?'"), Beck flogged his great and mighty 9/12 Project and its hobble on Washington as the next wave of activism: "All I can say is 'wow.' The 9/12 rally happened this weekend and if there was any question on where America stands right now, I think images from Washington, D.C., on Saturday should help answer them." Those images would include President Obama in full African witch doctor gear and signs that said armed revolution was imminent. Then, in one of those statements that reek of the shit-scent of failure, Beck said, "Estimates on the crowd size range from London's Daily Mail report of over 1 million, all the way to the obligatory 'tens of thousands' lowball. Whatever the actual number, it doesn't matter — the turnout was absolutely astonishing." Well, no, the actual number does matter. Because a million is huge and 60,000 is less than the number of fans at a good-sized college football game. (And we know that a. the Daily Mail is a right-wing celebrity-smearing rag, and b. that the crowd was in the tens of thousands. The lesson? If you have to cite the Daily Mail to back you up, chances are that you are wrong.) After ticking off a list of the "accomplishments" of his "movement," like getting the government to "fire" ACORN from taking part in census information-gathering (yet we still give money to Blackwater, whose employees murdered people), Beck seeks to cast his almost entirely white conservative Republican followers as an attack on "corruption" in the American government, no matter what the party. In a line that would make Ralph Nader proud, Beck says, "Sooner or later people on both sides of the aisle will realize that this isn't about left vs. right or conservative vs. liberal. We're being played by Republicans and Democrats. The weasels in Washington are pitting us against each other because it's convenient for them. They don't care about you. They are playing the same old Washington games and to play the game you have to play ball." And then to prove it he uses a provision in one health care bill to shore up union pension plans in the wake of Wall Street's collapse last year as evidence that the government is working against the people. And his "corrupt" organizations are ACORN and the SEIU, which would seem bipartisan if it wasn't just an attack on Democrats. He ends with the kind of threat that could have come from the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. After talking about how he wants 56 people to help re-found the country, just like the number of founders he comes up with (which included, you know, slaveholders), he offers to members of Congress and others in DC, "We love a good redemption story. If you come clean — and I can't promise it will be easy, there will be some rough days ahead — but if you come out and start the work of re-founding America, you will have an army behind you. Don't be on the wrong side of history." There's vermin in this world that'd reject Glenn Beck if he wanted to join with their rat brigades or roach clusters. This charlatan has embraced the inarticulate rage of people who are rendered dumb by Beck and and Limbaugh Fox "news" (and who don't get that entities like ACORN and the SEIU are actually trying to help them), and he's going to ride this wave of fear and retardation like a one-legged surfer trying to prove a point. For the sake of his ratings, Beck's gotta make 'em think they're more important than they are, that what they believe (and that is truly hard to figure out for them and for us watching, aghast, at the whole thing) is better and more American than what other Americans believe, and that no matter how small and pathetic and weak a contingent of nuts they may be, that they are some kind of lunatic army, ready to fight for some fantasy America that they've been told once existed, but that never did. Bonus points: Beck often cites the title of the Le Monde article that translates to "We are all Americans" as an example of something we should remember about the way the world thought of the United States on 9/12/01. That editorial was actually published on September 13, 2001.