Glenn Beck: Nazi-Sympathizer Sympathizer

Is it just me, or is Glenn Beck starting to remind you of Tom Hanks' creepy neighbors on The 'Burbs?

Oh them 'baggers love them some Hitler comparisons. But maybe not this one...

Becky's long praised Elizabeth Dilling, author of the 1934 anti-communist book "The Red Network", calling her one of the "people who were doing what we're doing now."

With almost painful predictability, it also turned out that Dilling was a leading Nazi sympathizer who spoke at American Nazi rallies, praised Hitler and referred to Eisenhower as "Ike The Kike". Dilling is now revered by white supremacists and neonazis for her "fearless" work against Jewish people.

It's hard to conclude that even Becky could have been this innocently stupid. Could anyone read up on Dilling and just ignore several hundred eye-popping occurrences of words like "Nazi", "antisemite" and "aryan"? Could anyone still push her as an anti-Communist hero and hope to gloss over the awkward fact that she was also a Nazi? Seems unlikely. But whether Glenn Beck has become spokesman for both the Tea Party and the American Nazi Party by accident or design is largely immaterial. Simon Maloy at Media Matters summed up the upshot back in June:

This isn't just beyond the pale -- it's probably the most significant major-media endorsement of American fascist ideology since the 1930s.

At this point it may become necessary to pinch yourself and remember that it's 2010 - not 1934 - and that we were supposed to be long done with this sh*t. Consider, for example, how many of Becky's supporters must have had family members who gave their lives fighting Hitler as part of Tom Brokaw's "Greatest Generation". Or how many more must be aware of the holocaust and the real, non-Obama, Nazis through watching "Schindler's List" or at least "Hogan's Heroes"... So the fact that a modern-day Nazi apologist like Becky gets to be a prominent figure in our mainstream media is quite literally a mind f*ck. Not so much 'pretzel logic' as 'pretzel reality' with a side of very stale sauerkraut.