David Corn flags Glenn Beck‘s attempt to take a swipe at him for describing his rants on Egypt as “off the charts” in craziness:
Beck: Really David. That’s why you work for Mother Jones and I work here. Night One we showed the similarities between Egypt 2011 and Iran 1979. That, too, was all about hundreds of thousands of people risking their lives in favor of democracy and freedom. But what happened? How’s that democracy working out in Iran? How’s democracy working anywhere in the Middle East, outside of Israel? Show me the democratic model in the Islamic world.
I’d tell Fox News to buy Beck an atlas where they could point out Turkey and Indonesia, but they literally couldn’t find Egypt on a map two years ago so it’s probably futile. What’s funny about this is that this statement is the exact point of view conservatives like Eliot Abrams and Jennifer Rubin were trying to attribute to opponents of the war in Iraq, that Arab and Muslim societies were in capable of becoming democracies. This argument was always a strawman–Americans were lead to believe that Iraq posed an imminent danger and was connected to the 9/11 attacks, they didn’t endorse democratizing Iraq at gunpoint. But let’s be clear on who is actually making the argument that Muslims are incapable of being democratic actors.
As Corn notes though, Beck supported the war in Iraq anyway.