Mark Levin: I have no idea what philosophy Glenn Beck is promoting. And neither does he

I was invited to be the opening speaker at Saturday's CPAC session. I had accepted but then, to my amazement, I learned that the John Birch Society would be one of many co-sponsors. This takes the big-tent idea many steps too far for me. So, I withdrew. Apparently, others were not so moved. That's fine. But it wasn't for me. Bill Buckley and Barry Goldwater, among others, chased the Birchers from the movement decades ago. And they're not a part of the movement. So, to give them a booth at CPAC was boneheaded.

I want to commend Bill Bennett for his wise piece this morning on the Corner. I agree with him.

I have no idea what philosophy Glenn Beck is promoting. And neither does he. It's incoherent. One day it's populist, the next it's libertarian bordering on anarchy, next it's conservative but not really, etc. And to what end? I believe he has announced that he is no longer going to endorse candidates because our problems are bigger than politics. Well, of course, our problems are not easily dissected into categories, but to reject politics is to reject the manner in which we try to organize ourselves. This is as old as Plato and Aristotle. Why would conservatives choose to surrender the political battlefield to our adversaries -- who are trashing this society -- when we must retake it in order to preserve our society? Philosophy, politics, culture, family, etc., are all of one. Edmund Burke, among others, wrote about it extensively, and far better that I possibly can. But all elements of the civil society require our defense. Besides, why preach such a strategy when conservatism is on the rise and the GOP is acting more responsibly?

Moreover, when he does discuss politics, which, ironically, is often, how can he claim today that there is no difference between the two parties when, but for the Republicans in Congress, government-run health care, cap-and-trade, card check, and a long list of other disastrous policies would already be law? The GOP is becoming more conservative thanks to the grass-roots movement and a political uprising across the country, which has even reached into New Jersey and Massachusetts. Why keep pretending otherwise? My only conclusion is that he is promoting a third party or some third way, which is counter-productive to defeating Obama and the Democrat Congress. These are perilous times and this kind of an approach will keep the statists in power for decades.

And what of his flirtations with Ron Paul's lunacy respecting America's supposed provocations with her enemies, including al-Qaeda? Why should such a fatal defect in thinking be ignored? Do we conservatives agree with this?

Finally, Beck is fond of congratulating himself for being the only or the first host to criticize George Bush's spending. This is demonstrably false. I not only attacked his spending, but the creation of the Homeland Security Department, the prescription drug add-on for Medicare, his "moderate" tax cuts, as well as his nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, "comprehensive immigration reform," and so forth. And I was not alone -- Rush and Sean did the same, for example. And as someone who fought liberal Republicans in the trenches when campaigning for Reagan in 1976 and 1980, I don't need lectures from Beck, who was nowhere to be found, about big-spending Republicans. But this is not about me, or Beck, or Beck's past drunkenness (which he endlessly wears as some kind of badge of honor). It is about preserving our society for our children and grandchildren. Beck spent precious little time aiming fire at Obama-Pelosi-Reid in his speech, and it is they who are destroying our country.

On as a positive note, I am personally happy to see that Beck has cleaned up his public act -- as best I can tell, no more boiling fake frogs on TV or pretending to pour gasoline on someone -- and the rest of it. But I do think his speech, which contained nuggets of truth heard before and read elsewhere, including on Rush's show and in my book and many other books, may have distracted from some of the more compelling and coherent speeches at the event, including Marco Rubio's superb speech. I fear the media will see to this. I hope not.

I make three observations from Mark Levin's remarks:

First, he is absolutely right about the danger to the conservative movement presented by the tendency to veer away to form a splinter party and Levin is absolutely correct in indicting Glenn Beck for this very dangerous deviancy.

Second, Glenn Beck is an extraordinary talent but one which is very much the product of his experience as well as of his very lively intellect. I believe the Glenn Beck is, in addition to being a recovering alcoholic who may or may not be on a dry drunk, a self-acknowledged bipolar personality. For someone uninformed about these diseases as Mr. Levin's remark about Beck wearing his alcoholism on his sleeve reveals Levin to be, Mark ought to understand that this does not impair the man's intellect and does not diminish the quality of his work or the shine of his talent, it merely puts a potential cloud over the horizon of Glenn Beck's future. What Mark Levin ought to understand from Beck's history is not the importance of the recitals of his bad behavior which Levin apparently finds offputting, but the significance of his recovery which came about by way of an epiphany. The power of epiphany has been well documented since the time of Saul of Tarsus through the experience both of John McCain and George Bush. To understand the man without understanding the effects of that experience, is to comprehend but a part of the person. You cannot understand George Bush, as the Democrats never could understand George Bush, without knowing that he was living out the epiphany he experienced with Billy Graham.

Third, it ill becomes Mark Levin to comment on Beck's histrionics in view of the inexcusable behavior of Mark Levin toward his callers which diminishes him and compromises every intellectual pretension as well as the genuine moments of tender humility which Levin is capable of revealing. Levin is quite correct to challenge Beck's incoherence and his illogic in attacking Republicans when he equates them with Democrats. I echo that sentiment as I watched Glenn Beck's speech at CPAC which I thought was rambling and incoherent but powerful because of its passion and honesty.

Here are three posts about Glenn Beck going back to September 2009:

I had never heard of Glenn back until after the election yet he is closest to my views of any radio talk jock today. More than any other radio personality, even including Dennis Prager, Beck thinks thematically rather than episodically, that is, reacting to events. He clearly sees the threat to the nation and pulls together the threads to explain the motivation and methods of the Obama administration. He explores in depth, for example, the relationship between Obama and Acorn and the influence of George Soros and the implications for American liberty and does so in a way that makes the whole pattern plain and understandable.

For those of us who have been calling Obama a Manchurian Marxist since before the election, all of this is very gratifying. That is not to say that Limbaugh is not brilliant at skewering Obama. Hannity is a great chronicaler of the sins of the administration. Levin also operates thematically and is implacable devoted to liberty and reacts with repugnance to stateism, but he vitiates his credibility with pointless and excessive humiliation of his callers.

On first impression one would not detect that Glenn Beck has a extremely facile mind. He is probably as bright as Levin and carries a great deal of charisma and an unassuming boy next-door kind of likability. In my judgment, Glenn Beck's greatest liability is what I detect to be a tendency towards bipolar excess. A recovering alcoholic, he might be what they describe as on a "dry drunk." This has nothing whatever to do with the quality of this analysis but it does have to do with his emotional stability. I hope and trust that he can `maintain a true course because he represents a very valuable voice for conservatism/libertarianism.

More, he puts together the whole package and illustrates the very real multifaceted threat to our liberties presented by the Manchurian Marxist.

I do take issue with Beck on his persistent and unnecessary lashing out against Republicans when he equates them with Democrats. No one should ask me to take a back seat in the game of criticizing the Republicans including George Bush. I have my posts which I can produce showing that I predicted the defeat in 2006 because the Republicans departed from conservative values. I took a lot of flack for predicting the defeats in 2006 and 2008. For a long time my favorite slap at the Republicans was, "the only thing we learned from the election of 2008 is that we have learned nothing from the election of 2006." I think the party has since learned much of the lesson, although that is not to predict that they will hold fast to their rediscovered truths. But as flawed as the Republicans are, they are infinitely preferable to the modern Democrat party which is infected with a virus of stateism to a degree that it constitutes a real and mortal threat to our constitutional republic.

I part with Beck because he engages in moral relativism when it comes to equating Republicans and their declensions with the truly dangerous threat presented by Democrats. It tells me that Beck misunderstands the nature of the electoral system in America when he tells his listeners to vote for independents. America operates on a two-party system and any deviation from that convention will bring electoral woe to the deviant. I consider that this foolishness is the result of a bent toward libertarianism. The point is not to have fidelity to a business called the Republican Party, the point is that conservatism needs a vehicle to wield political power and there is no viable option exists except the Republican Party which conservatism can exploit to save the Republic.

Otherwise Beck is a great talent and very, very sound.

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she I agree on all counts and I also think that he has "tendency" toward a bipolar personality. I have not read his autobiography if there is one but his description of himself in which she candidly describes himself as a bad person, fits my "supposition."

Do you recall that he has more than once told the story of firing a man because he brought him the wrong pen. He uses the story to illustrate the kind of person he was. By his own admission he was a man haunted by aberrant behavior.

He has had a spiritual epiphany. So did George Bush and, although George Bush certainly is not bipolar and certainly never took a drink while he was in the White House, there is an obvious parallel to observe. I think Glenn Beck resembles George Bush in the respect that he was saved from himself by his epiphany. Both men claim that to be the case.

I am at a loss to understand why it is inappropriate to discuss that which both men have themselves made public. While Glenn Beck has never, to my knowledge, admitted to a bipolar personality, such a diagnosis is fully in keeping with the history he himself puts before the world.

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He has a disturbing tendency to finish other people sentences and interrupt them before they've completed their statement which is often a reply to a question he had asked. I think that is because he is as you have described him, going off in a wholly new direction and assumes that others have intuited the rest of his guest's answer to his question as he has.

I think your insight about his commitment, literally a life and death commitment for him, to serving the truth is key. That means that his motives are pure, his heart is white. However, it may also indicate an impatience with others who disagree with him who are also possessed of white hearts. And, if he does not have a spiritual or psychological mentor at his side, his vision of the truth can easily be distorted into a kind of megalomania. I think that is why he has that psychologist on his show so often and why I intuited that the man is probably treating him or mentoring him somehow.

So we are dealing here with glimpses of genius and a potential for disaster. Incidentally, most of the objections to Winston Churchill could be framed in the same kind of language. Even after the war his professional military men would say things to this effect , he had a dozen ideas every day and one of them would be good, my job was to prevent the other 11."

I believe Glenn Beck when he says that he is marching to a different drummer. I think you have identified the music. He is not after ratings, he is not after money, he is not really after adulation, he is on a crusade. He has had a spiritual epiphany.

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