Even those who typically write off Glenn Beck as paranoid, even crazy, must admit sometimes he “catches a real-life demon in his fantasy-world gallery of rogues, and he becomes oddly reasonable”—and he did so twice this week. First, he argued the alleged Times Square terrorist should have been read his rights; then, he offered “a partly coherent and even accurate critique of the International Monetary Fund,” writes Gabriel Winant on Salon.
“Beck is a perfect illustration of the ways that the left and the right have developed an odd consonance recently,” but his motivations are still different than his opponents’. “Like many of us on the left, he doesn’t like the current concentration of power in the hands of the modern, global elite,” Winant writes. “But don't get too close, because he doesn’t much like the idea of those of us on the left—minorities, intellectuals, the working class, the poor—getting our hands on it, either."
(More Glenn Beck stories.)