Glenn Beck = Morton Downey, Jr.?

Wow. I don't know why that hadn't occurred to me before. I've used Morton Downey, Jr.--the 80s bombastic talk show host--as an example of a time when outsized political characters were considered fringe. Folks like Rush Limbaugh were right there with Downey, non-mainstream, far-right ideologues. Sometime late in the Clinton Administration--probably around the time that FOX "News" was born--those two and others like them got normalized. In contrast, the middle was now left, and the ordinary left was now far-left by default. The actual far-left has no equal to the far-right, as far as I know. Can you name one?

Glenn Beck's star may have tarnished a bit since his zenith in 2009, but he's still wound up tight, and throwing sparks nightly. Could he flame out like Downey did?

[Excerpt]

Fox exec to Beck: "Everything you’re talking about is coming"

Glenn Beck tells his radio audience about an amazing conversation he had with a Fox News executive. . .Beck went on to say that the executive told him "we have to convince the audience that this is really truly true."

So what is the "this" that the Fox executive wants Beck to convince people is true? None other than Beck's crazy theories like his week-long special from last August claiming that "America is burning to the ground. . ."

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