Glenn Beck was in top form yesterday, anticipating Scott Brown's win in Massachusetts by launching into yet another tirade about the Monstrous Evil Known As Progressivism. This one was flat-out eliminationist, describing progressives variously as objects fit only for extermination, including diseases and monsters:
Beck: Progressives were lurking like a virus, waiting for their chance to suck all of the blood out of the Democratic neck. They were looking for the opening to infect the system. And once they were inside that system, I warned in 2004, the Democrats -- it will be a battle to the end of your party to get them out.
... What we are talking about is an ideological movement that has set its sights on the destruction of the Constitution and the fundamental transformation of our Republic. It is called the progressive movement, and it has been using both parties for a long, long time.
But mainly, it's the Democratic Party that has played host to it. And this parasite has been feeding on that host.
If Obama does the smart thing and re-energize his base, however, Beck will consider that confirmation of his running theory that Obama is a closet black Marxist/fascist radical bent on destroying America:
Beck: America, if these people are only politicians, they will do what they did in 1994, and they will migrate, starting tomorrow, right to the center.
But if we're right, that these are Marxist revolutionaries, that these are progressives who follow Mao, they are gonna put the foot on the gas -- it's not gonna be pretty. And they will eat their own, the Democrats, first.
Beck is obviously reading the Massachusetts results as proof that voters are buying into the Tea Party movement's right-wing panaceas and are repudiating health-care reform. That may not be the case: Media Matters notes that Massachusetts voters already have universal health care, and the issue wasn't of much importance to Brown supporters.
But watch in the coming weeks for calls to Democrats to expel the evil progressives from their midst.
And Republicans, too, no doubt. Which will mean, according to Beck, driving out evil "progressives" like John McCain and Lindsey Graham.
