Glenn Beck's Scalp Is a Small Trophy:
And thus we come to the end of our long national nightmare. Or, you know, at least the regular weeknight TV version of that nightmare. Yes, yes, let us crow and howl that Glenn Beck has been driven from the Fox “news” airwaves and his pudgy puss of doom won’t yap at us anymore from our cable boxes. Except, you know, when he’s on other Fox “news” shows. And on his website. And when he’s on his daily three-hour radio show. But no one gives a shit about what radio hosts have to say, right? Right?

In the course of day, Fox "news" allows all manner of paranoiacs, Armageddon-floggers, generic nutzoid conservatives, and raging egomaniacs looking for some justification to their existence to go on the air and get their turn bobbing on that Murdoch knob for a taste of the glorious choad of fame and relevance. It has put out of its misery only the most blatant of its showcases for the the extremists’ collective anxieties, only the biggest bellows for the little flame of racism and class ignorance that burns in so many American hearts. Beck is going to be gone. And in getting rid of him, Fox may get back some advertisers, we out here in Left Blogsylvania get to dance with his scalp, and his followers now see him as a martyr whose exile just proves what he was saying all along.

Oh, sure, the Rude Pundit agrees that Beck should have been off the air long ago. As soon as he went from sneering Obama smear artist to Muslim-hating, Nazi-threatening, Antichrist-predicting mad dog, he should have been put down or at least charged for the time like Pat Robertson. He decided to go scary preacher on his Fox audience, and that’s why it has shrunk and why advertisers ran frightened into the sweet, marginally saner arms of other Fox shows. Angelo Carusone of StopBeck and Media Matters did yeoman's work in using the invisible hand of the market to fuck up Beck's world.

Honestly, though, the Rude Pundit likes his crazies out in the open where we can keep an eye on ‘em. Getting Glenn Beck booted from Fox "news" is like stepping on a cockroach in a house full of poisonous spiders. It doesn't do much except give the poor bastards doing God's work at News Hounds and Media Matters a slightly less deranged hour of television to watch. Those of us who tuned in to Beck at 5 p.m. (and get to for another few months) did so masochistically, bathing in the effulgence of his batshittery. Otherwise, the audience that he has will merely follow him wherever else he may roam.

That said, though, in the karmic realm of the airwaves, less Beck is better for our souls.

(Quick note: In his self-congratulatory little speech telling his audience that he was "leaving" Fox, Beck said, "Paul Revere did not get up on the horse and say, 'I'm going to do this for the rest of my life.' He didn't do it. He got off the horse at some point and fought in the Revolution, and then he went back to silversmithing." Yeah, about that: Paul Revere was a fucking awful soldier. He was even charged with treason because he sucked so badly but found not guilty in a court-martial proceeding. He was, however, a very good silversmith.)