Last week I wrote about the "feud" between Glenn Beck and Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol, namely the notion that there's a clear dividing line between someone like Beck and Kristol when it comes to inventing "connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left." National Review Editor Rich Lowry intervened on Kristol's side, applauding him for criticizing Beck's "wild theorizing."
This got really awkward on Friday, because Beck interviewed Andy McCarthy and promoted his book, The Grand Jihad, which posits an alliance between "radical Islamists" and the American left, and whose author has openly speculated that the president himself is doing the bidding of the Muslim Brotherhood. McCarthy's ravings have been enabled and embraced by the mainstream right.
McCarthy of course, is a columnist at Lowry's magazine, where he regularly offers this kind of craziness. McCarthy's belief that the Justice Department is filled with terrorist sympathizers was the basis for the campaign Kristol and Liz Cheney's group Keep America Safe's McCarthyist smear campaign.
Beck is a crank, but he's a useful crank. The reason conservatives haven't stood up to him until now is that they're perfectly fine with him spreading lies and outlandish conspiracy theories as long as they're not interfering with their preferred policy outcomes. Beck's fearmongering about Egypt put him on Kristol and Lowry's bad side, but don't get it twisted. All Beck did was deploy the right lies at the wrong time. Beck didn't say anything that Kristol or Lowry, under different circumstances, wouldn't feel entirely comfortable printing in their own publications.
I doubt it was a coincidence that Beck decided to tout McCarthy's book and interview him on air. In doing so, he's merely pointing out where he gets his conspiracy theories about Islamists and the radical left--from the very pages of Kristol and Lowry's magazines. He might as well have stared into the camera at Kristol and Lowry before whispering, "I'm not a crank, I'm you."
