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Three quick notes from elsewhere, all gathered into this post for your chuckling pleasure (except for Beck, which is just worth a deep sigh and shake of the head):

From Meteor Blades, over at Daily Kos, a short diary on Glenn Beck. Here's the Beck quote that's the basis for MB's comments:

BECK: I'm not saying that [Obama] doesn't like white people, I'm saying he has a problem. He has a ... this guy is, I believe, a racist. Look at the way...look at the things he has been surrounded by ...

Let's give [sic] his new green job czar. The guy is, again, black liberation theology, a black nationalist, um, who is also an avowed communist. He comes in and he puts that guy in. Well, wait a minute. How many people with this kind of philosophy do you need to have in your life before we start to say show me your friends and I'll show you your peo... your future?

And here's Meteor Blades' money comment:

It became clear to me that despite the paucity of his gray matter, Beck's ultimate mindset is no different than the Klansmen who occasionally showed up to intimidate people during my childhood in southwest Georgia. Not too bright, to be sure, but influential because people who would never participate in a lynching never worked to bring to justice people who did.

Beck's demonization of President Obama depends on a rancid upsidedown discourse grounded in profoundly disturbing cultural resentment, which contains its own special illogic. It's not original, nor clever, but it nevertheless has an impact.

He goes on to wonder "just how far they will let Beck go. Or spur him to. Will they give him a pass the day that he, like the Rwandan radio provocateurs of 15 years ago, starts calling Obama and his supporters "cockroaches" to be stamped out?"

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On a somewhat lighter note, there is the current "birther" movement, still screaming that Obama is not really an American citizen. Want to know why Jon Stewart is currently America's most trusted news anchor? Watch him destroy that whole meme:

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And finally, a hat tip to Jake over at Page One for catching this article at Gawker about Sarah Palin's Descent Into Incoherency. The best part is their review of her recent departure speech:

It's like Peggy Noonan, Jack London, and William Faulkner wandered into the woods with three buttons of peyote and one typewriter, and only this speech emerged.

And she wrote this speech! In advance, on paper! What does any of it mean? It is amazing. Twenty years ago she could competently descibe a dog race, three years ago she could articulate a position on the abortion issue, and this weekend she composed a resignation speech by throwing culture war stock phrases into a hat and dumping it upside
down on a copy of The Paranoid Style in American Politics.

Go read the entire article. It's actually a pretty good analysis, and a good question. But the Noonan-London-Faulkner quote is genius.