Beck-Ola

Fox News made a lot of liberals happy for a change this week. The so-called "fair and balanced news" channel announced that Glenn Beck's show, on at 5 PM Eastern, will end later this year.

I'm not happy. I'm very upset . . . about having to wait so long before it ends!

The Beckster, as Ed Schultz likes to call him, has the third highest-rated show on cable news, but Beck's ratings have been plummeting recently as Beck himself has gotten weirder. He's suggested, among other things, that both George Walker Bush and Barack Obama have been helping to bring about a new pan-Islamic caliphate in the Middle East by refusing to bomb the ruins of ancient Babylon during the Iraq War. Seems Beck thinks the caliphate's capital is to be established there.

Some of Beck's recent theories of world domination by enemies of America sound like they came right out of James Bond movies or Saturday morning television cartoons, but Beck has been under protest from liberal activists virtually since his Fox show began in January 2009. Remember that Beck - on another Fox show - declared in July of that year that President Obama had a "deep-seated hatred for white people," and in August 2010 Beck famously told people who were dropped from unemployment benefits after 99 weeks to work at McDonald's if they had to, even though the fast-food chain had more job applicants than jobs. His Austin Powers-redolent world government theories were only part of his problem.

Anyway, enough advertisers pulled their TV commercials from the Beckster's show to encourage Fox to drop him, although Beck and the network will (reportedly) continue to work together to develop new programming. Beck is going behind the scenes, where he likely won't be heard from again, and he's treating this career change like a promotion.

It's a Pyrrhic victory in one respect. Beck goes against noted MSNBC wild man Chris Matthews, who answers Beck's wild theories on a regular basis, in the same 5 PM Eastern time slot, and even today he trounces Matthews's "Hardball" show in the ratings. So even as Matthews rants against Beck, Beck still gets more viewers. I suppose more people found out the truth about Beck by seeing the rerun of "Hardball" at 7 PM Eastern, or maybe people suddenly started to find Beck moronic on their own and stopped watching. But mostly, it was likely the petitioning against Beck's advertisers that did him in. That's the same reason Beck's radio show has been dropped from so many stations.

Beck's impending departure from Fox and his diminished presence on radio comprise a blow against the right's toxic gibberish, and Dana Milbank of the Washington Post suggests that Beck's raging paranoia against the system is less of a factor in the body politic now that the economy is slowly recovering. However, the campaign against Beck only treated a symptom. The disease, in the form of Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, and that Long Island Irish Nazi Sean Hannity - all of whom can be as loony as Beck and also are just as mean-spirited - goes merrily on. Right-wing talk shows will never die. Remember, this is America.