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A schizoid raving street loon tends to command attention purely for the freak show curiosity of passers by, yet the nonsense is rarely taken seriously.

This isn't the case with Glenn Beck. Several million people every day take his word for it. They're suckered into buying the ruse. And it's bad for America.

What his regular viewers haven't grasped yet is that he's putting on a show. He's playing a role. He's tricking his audience. Unlike a left-leaning audience, Beck's audience is mostly composed of white conservative Christians who pride themselves on taking certain things on faith, and who often act against their own financial interests for the sake of patriotic cheerleading. It's an audience that embraces gun ownership and tends to be more reactionary and militaristic.

But it's hard to blame Beck's audience for being fished in. There's no wink and nod, so he's clearly not attempting some sort of obviously satirical character like Stephen Colbert or even a more bizarre character like Andy Kaufman's Tony Clifton. He performs this role as seamlessly as any decent character actor, but he never tips his hand (we're generally told when an actor is acting). Just an occasional mention of himself as a "rodeo clown." There's no crawl at the end listing "Glenn Beck as 'Glenn Beck.'" It's not a fiction program.

Glenn Beck is playing a character with a personality and a style that is laser focused at the souls of an intended audience. It doesn't take many minutes of viewing his television show to see that he's mashing up the most effective and successful aspects of Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones and '60s Bircher author Cleon Skousen, and filtering it all through the performance techniques of a televangelist. Listen to any random monologue by Glenn Beck and then watch some clips of televangelist Jack Van Impe. Both are master manipulators and (crazy aside) riveting speakers. They each nail their audiences with rapid-fire barrages of nonsense presented as dramatic fact -- so twisted and obscured that it begins to seem real and anything that might not seem entirely plausible, just have faith. After all, there are complicated drawings on a blackboard! Oh, and he cries. So he must be serious.

This is all stuff that's been proven to resonate with (and utterly manipulate) certain American audiences who also willingly hand over their cash to obvious flimflam artists claiming to provide salvation. Glenn Beck is just pooling these techniques and applying them to American politics.

Instead of asking for donations, by the way, Beck just markets all varieties of crap-on-a-stick to his people. Beck has released seven books since 2007. Seven books in three years! Add to the mix three DVD releases and 26 compact disc releases. There's his subscription-only "Insider Extreme" website which charges $75 per year. There's a print magazine called "Fusion" (20 issues for $66). There are the obligatory t-shirts, mugs and other forms of cheap swag. All of this is heaped on top of a multimillion dollar Fox News contract and a syndicated radio deal worth $50 million over five years. Capitalism is one thing, but Beck is manipulating his audience to hand over their cash in exchange for swag that can't possibly be worth the price, considering the volume of his output (seven books in three years!). As the saying goes: how hard he prays depends on how much you pay.

One of the reasons why the network news media was generally, in decades past, kept separate from the ratings and profit-motive of entertainment divisions was that to cross these streams, so to speak, would lead to the corruption of the news, forcing it to be driven by what sells, not necessarily by what's true. And, it goes without saying that such a corruption of the news is inherently damaging to democracy.

To that point, Glenn Beck likes to say that he's the new Howard Beale, the tragic and suicidal anchor from the movie Network. He's not. In fact, Paddy Chayefsky's screenplay was a prescient warning about the rise of charlatans like Glenn Beck infiltrating the news media -- regardless of whether or not they're presented as "opinion journalists." Actually, Beck goes far beyond the scope of opinion journalism as well, and has settled in a danger zone where he incites easily-manipulated, often militaristic audiences based on theories and claims that don't hold up to even the most cursory fact-checking, say nothing of empirical reality.

In terms of his impact, Beck isn't Howard Beale at all. He's closer to Lee Atwater.

In the riveting, must-see documentary, Boogie Man, about the rise and fall of the infamous Republican political operative, it's revealed that Atwater once considered politics to be nothing more than a game. Professional wrestling. Atwater, we learn, would have been perfectly happy doing what he did for either political party. Republican or Democrat. It didn't matter to him. After all, it was just a game. A show. And he was really good at producing a hell of a show -- no matter how many lives he left in his wake.

Yet at the end of his life, Atwater realized that treating politics like a wrestling match was a mistake. In politics, unlike wrestling, the societal damage is real. The lives are real.

Bloated and crippled from his cancer treatment, Atwater regretted using the Southern Strategy -- exploiting race as a wedge. He regretted making so many enemies, one of which being Ed Rollins who he had double-crossed during the waning years of the Reagan administration. He regretted the creation of his own reality at the expense of empirical reality.

While he was very successful in treating national affairs like a cornball burlesque show and throwing all professional ethics aside in the name of winning, the lesson of Lee Atwater is that such behavior is ultimately destructive.

The Glenn Beck Show might seem like the political equivalent of professional wrestling, but it's not even that sincere. At least with wrestling, we're all most aware that wrestling follows a script even though some of the moves require a high caliber of strength and athleticism (and occasionally resulting in real injuries to the performers). The difference between Beck and wrestling is that with Beck the fakery isn't common knowledge and the consequences of what he talks about on his show are very real.

He's committing a nationally televised fraud and, given the sorts of people who are the most susceptible to his trickery, it's only a matter of time before Beck's deception takes a tragic turn.

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he generally makes my brain try to make a run for my earlobes

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I don't know if he needs credibility, he has audience, which is what gives media people power.

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