Today, on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Joe Scarborough became a sort of Margaret Chase Smith of the media. Sure, the so-called lefty bloggers have questioned Glenn Beck’s sanity and the damage his paranoid ravings are having on national discourse. But Scarborough, a conservative, believes the Glenn Beck neo-McCarthyistic style discredits the right and plays into the worst caricatures of conservatives.
Scarborough quoted extensively from a blog post by Peter Wehner, a conservative writer and Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “Glenn Beck has become the most disturbing personality on cable television. One cannot watch him for any length of time without being struck by his affinity for conspiracies and for portraying himself as the great decoder of events….The danger when one paints the world in such conspiratorial terms is that it devalues the rational side of politics. It encourages a cast of mind that looks to expose enemies rather than to engage in arguments…what ought to worry conservatives in particular is that Beck not only has the unusual capacity to discredit virtually every cause he takes up; he also confirms the worst caricatures of the right.”
Scarborough said: “It’s the conspiracy theories that are the most dangerous because that gets people acting out.”
