The Clown Show

David Weigel has a great interview with Alexander Zaitchik who's written what sounds like a laugh-a-minute profile of Glenn Beck.

What sort of attempts did you make to interview Beck for this book? If you made those attempts why were you denied?

I never tried to get in touch with him or his inner-circle. Even if he had agreed to talk to me, which was extremely unlikely, I wouldn’t have believed a word that came out of his mouth. Beck may not know much about politics or history, but he has arguably the most demonstrably sophisticated instinct for self-promotion on earth. I wasn’t interested in allowing Beck to use the book as a way to reinforce his well crafted and partly fictitious redemption narrative. Nor was I interested in trading my cerebellum for subject-access. I’ll leave that kind of thing to Zev Chafets.

Um, snap.

Shots at Zev "Rush is misunderstood" Chafets aside, Zaitchik makes a great point.

In the last year, Media Matters and other liberal groups have made a cottage industry of Beck-watching and Beck-bashing. I think you show that he loves this stuff — he loves it when people mock him for crying. Is the left doing a shoddy job of challenging Beck?

It is very easy and extremely tempting for liberals to tee-off on everything that comes out of Beck’s mouth. He’s a giant tree whose branches bend with juicy, chest-high fruit. But what I think a lot of people don’t understand is that this is all by careful design. Beck understands that controversy is the closest thing to a publicity perpetual-motion machine. He’s been courting controversy for decades. That’s the name of the game he learned in radio—get them talking about you, raise your profile—and it's in his blood in a way it can only be for someone who has been fighting for his survival in ratings wars since he was a teenager. It’s all about being in the news, finding the next biggest stage on which to promote his shows and his sponsors. Beck loves it when people go after him for crying, or blog about silly questions like, “Did he really boil the frog?”

Back in Baltimore in the early '90s, he crafted this whole extensive bit around hamsters and snakes in order to get PETA protesting in the station parking lot. He’s a positional marketing mastermind. It’s not a coincidence that the “third most listened to” show on talk radio is so well branded as being hosted by “the crying conservative with the chalk board and the Truth.” He knows exactly what he’s doing. I wish the left was better at resisting some of the bait he dangles on a daily basis, and focus on the bigger picture, like the agenda of [David and Charles] Koch-funded groups like Americans for Prosperity, which feeds Beck most of his scripts. That, and the content of the religious pseudo-histories he keeps telling people to read. At some point, enough is enough, and the left is letting him run this never-ending diversion play.

Like a lot of "modern conservatives," Beck is fueled by victimhood and his audience -- themselves feeling like the victims of what they perceive as affirmative action on their backs -- drinks it in like nectar.

More on the Koch brothers and their dad, a founding member of the John Birch Society.