The Mad Prophet of the Airwaves nears the end of his run

Glenn Beck's advertisers are pulling out--including big ones like Wal-Mart and Geico. Which means that his support is caving: I'm sure nearly everyone will stampede out of there in the next few days. I guess the craziness could only go so far before his corporate masters reigned it in.

To be honest, though, I'll miss it. It really was such a singular phenomenon--the bizarre way he would address the camera, his sudden outbursts of emotion that ended just as quickly as they began, his paranoid--and yet incredibly vague and meaningless--sloganeering. We surround them. It doesn't mean anything so much as faintly evoke some primal scene from 100,000 years ago, when our clan had the other surrounded.

In any case, I wonder what he'll do--whether he'll do the O'Reilly/Olberman thing and tone things down, or heroically banish himself into the wilderness, the bane of corporations and reasonable people alike.

Destroying America in order to save it

It's a cheap exercise to single out videos of people you disagree with making fools of themselves, but I can't resist this time:



Remarkable. Beck, at the end, even explicitly ponders aloud that Bin Laden would certainly refrain from any kind of attack, lest ass-kicking Beck-followers seize power in Washington and..er..start kicking ass--apparently not realizing that Bin Laden not attacking us is, you know, a good thing.

But let's be charitable: what do these guys really think? I think it's something like this: in their view, the country is going to hell in a handbasket, and is on pace to either destroy itself or be destroyed/overwhelmed by outside forces. And so a timely Bin Laden attack would be a nation-saving wake-up call, the harm done to the victims of the attack notwithstanding. That is what they think.

Which is, you know, really crazy and myopic.

Video via Sullivan.