As Beck "associates the evil artists with their patron, Rockefeller," Howard notes that, "unfortunately, he doesn't specify which one. In fact, he jumps around to several of them without making any distinction":

Beck begins his unveiling with a denouncement of a relief at the entrance to Rockefeller Center. The work shows two men on either side of the doors. Beck tells us that one is holding a hammer, and the other a sickle. Ergo communism! It's right there in plain sight. Except that the first man is actually holding a shovel, according to the historians curating the Center's artwork. The figures were meant to represent the strength of America's industry and agriculture, which I'm sure Beck views as treasonous.

Then Beck focuses on a bas relief carving by Italian-American sculptor Attilio Piccirilli called Youth Leading Industry. Beck's interpretation of this work centers on his theory that the artist, and thus the work, were avowedly fascist. Beck asserts that a strong male figure in the piece is Mussolini. Whether or not that's true, and there is some debate, it is illustrative of Beck's dementia that he can jump from warnings about progressives being communists to progressives being fascists without taking a breath.

"In the real world," meanwhile, Howard explains the historical fact that "Mussolini was a bitter foe of Stalin and vice versa." See the recent issue of FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Glenn Beck Is No Howard Beale: He's Mad Like a Fox, and Wants to Take Us In" (6/09) by Steve Rendall.

Hiltzik looks back to an earlier era of supposed presidential "socialism" in the U.S. to see such current claims as "merely the latest examples of a phenomenon that might be called Wirtism"--a label Hiltzik "just coined... to honor the memory of William A. Wirt":

Wirt's day in the sun came back in 1934, when the obscure Midwestern blowhard placed himself at the center of a political maelstrom by "discovering" a plot by members of Franklin Roosevelt's Brain Trust to launch a Bolshevik takeover of the United States.

That Wirt's yarn was transparently absurd didn't keep it from being taken seriously on the front pages of newspapers coast to coast, including the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. He gave speeches, wrote a book and went to Washington to give personal testimony at a standing-room-only congressional hearing.

If that reminds you of the overly solicitous treatment given by the press, cable news programs and Republican office holders to purveyors of such lurid claptrap as the Obama birth certificate story or the fantasy of healthcare "death panels," now you know why it pays to study history.

One "reason not to chuckle condescendingly at Wirt," Hiltzik warns, "is the thought of what might happen were he to walk the Earth today," when Hiltzik thinks that "rather than being disowned in embarrassment, he'd be lionized as a purveyor of an alternate truth" while "given a gig on cable news and touted as a presidential contender for 2012."