Nutball of the Week: Glenn Beck

This week's nutball award goes to Fox News personality Glenn Beck who will host a "Restoring Honor" rally tomorrow at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Dana Milbank of The Washington Post reports.

I was reminded of Beck's affection for deception as he hyped his march on Washington -- an event scheduled for the same date (Aug. 28) and on the same spot (the Lincoln Memorial) as Martin Luther King Jr.'s iconic march 47 years ago. Beck claimed it was pure coincidence, but then he made every effort to appropriate the mantle of the great civil rights leader.

It's been just over a year since Beck famously called the first African-American president a "racist" with a "deep-seated hatred for white people." And now, accused of racial pot-stirring, he apparently has determined that the best defense is to be patently offensive. "Blacks don't own Martin Luther King," he tells us, any more than whites own Lincoln or Washington. "The left" doesn't own King, either, he says. No, Beck owns King. "This is the moment, quite honestly, that I think we reclaim the civil rights movement," he said this spring. "We are on the right side of history. We are on the side of individual freedoms and liberties and, damn it, we will reclaim the civil rights moment. We will take that movement because we are the people that did it in the first place."

Wow. Given Beck's record of stretching the truth as documented by non-partisan web-site Politifact.com, we should probably retire the nutball trophy and come up with another award. The weekly charlatan? The conman award?

--Ballard Burgher