You can’t make this stuff up–at least I hope you can’t. It takes an accomplished demagogue to do this. I really don’t care one way or the other what Beck thinks or dreams about American politics as such, but America has some responsibility of self-assumed leadership in world affairs. As a democracy, it matters when we delude ourselves about the citizens of other nations, and certainly citizens who treat us as friends and who share our democratic aspirations.

Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes should be ashamed of themselves for this.

Reasonable people can be strongly in disagreement with President Obama’s policies on whatever subject, and patriotic people can be sharply critical of an elected president; reasonable people can have different views about Kenyatta and Kenya’s political history and about Obama, Sr.’s role or lack thereof, and about Kenya’s new constitution, but taken in sum total this is truly, deeply and offensively ignorant and disrespectful to millions of people who never did anything to Glenn Beck.

I have never been a Marxist or in any way pro-Soviet–I am an old “Cold War Republican” or at least have been. I have never even been a Democrat. I am not a natural ally of Obama. Nonetheless, this type of smear by long strings of rambling insinuations based on distortions of facts likely unknown to Beck’s audience, seems to me outside the bounds of how small “d” democrats talk to each other about their country and its elected leaders and Beck and his enablers deserve to be called on it.