This morning on his radio program, Glenn Beck responded to the general outcry over his approving comments last week for the work of Elizabeth Dilling, a virulent anti-Semite who actively supported Hitler and the Nazis during World War II. Beck's response contained neither an apology nor a disavowal nor any indication whatsoever that he was at all contrite over using his considerable media presence to promote a discredited and hateful woman's writings.

Instead, he said this:

BECK: But I'm also getting some amazing mail from the left that now says I'm a Nazi anti-Semite because I quoted a book on Friday -- it was the Red Book, or something like that. It was a who's who, who's in the communist party in 1935. Apparently, I don't know, apparently written by a Nazi sympathizer here in America. Part of the, I'm sure -- I don't know because I didn't look it up -- but I'm sure part of the Father Coughlin, social justice crowd, because this is the choice that progressives give you -- you're either a Nazi or a communist. No, I'm neither. But now -- so now I'm kind of stuck between the place where the left says that I'm a Nazi sympathizer and a Jew lover. So I guess the left can have it all, that I'm a Jew-loving Nazi sympathizer. It's a really interesting place that I don't know if anybody's ever been.

I'd like to point out a few things to Beck here.

First of all, you don't get to play like you don't even really remember what book you were talking about. You told everyone that you spent all of Thursday night reading it, and you were praising it to the skies on Friday as an early example of the sort of communist documentation you yourself claim to be currently undertaking: “This is a book -- and I'm a getting a ton of these -- from people who were doing what we're doing now. We now are documenting who all of these people are. Well, there were Americans in the first 50 years of this nation that took this seriously, and they documented it.” I mean, really, Glenn -- you held the book in your hand as you feted it:

Second, because you were so effusive in your praise for the book, you don't get to attack the author now that you've learned that she was a Nazi. And by the way, I'd avoid saying things like “I didn't look it up” before launching into such attacks, because it was quite clearly that sort of incuriousness and recklessness that got you into this mess into the first place.

Third, you have absolutely no standing to attack “the left” for criticizing you for promoting The Red Network, a book that (according to the limited preview on Google Books) contains this passage:

...few years, under the opportunities of the American government and the inspiration of Christianity, the American Negroes have acquired professions, property, banks, homes, and produced a rising class of refined, home loving people. This is far more remarkable than that many Negroes are still backward. The Reds play upon the Negroes' love of their own people and represent them as persecuted in order to inflame them against the very white people who have in reality given the colored race far greater opportunities than their fellow negroes would give them in Africa today. [page 36]

And this one:

It is interesting to note in Communist literature that criminal violence is always promoted and excused under a cloak of supposed martyrdom. Negroes are urged to fight their white “oppressors,” who actually have freed them and given them better jobs and opportunities than exist in Africa. [page 55]

And this one:

Speakers for the debasing and degrading Hindu, Mohammedan, Pagan, and Agnostic Cults are placed in “fellowship” and on an equal footing with speakers for Jesus Christ. The audiences chant a mixture of prayers and ritual from all of these. The savage Mohammedan call of the muezzin as heard in darkest Asia is mingled with the propaganda of the Hindu, Jew and agnostic. Negro choirs and performers give an interracial touch to the meetings. [page 152]

Sorry, Glenn, but you don't get to play the ignorant victim here, and you certainly don't get to play the role of the attack dog.