Showing the sort of grit and courage you'd expect from a man who proclaims himself the savior of the nation, Glenn Beck recently fielded some softball questions from Jason Mattera, the frat-clown editor of the disreputable conservative magazine Human Events. Discussing his upcoming 8-28 “Restoring Honor” rally, Beck explained that the event is designed to take the country back 200 years to the gauzy, ill-defined era when people got ahead based not on their parentage, but on their hard work -- or, if you lived in the South, other people's hard work.

Anyway, here's how Beck put it:

BECK: It goes back to -- 8-28 was Martin Luther King's “I have a dream” speech, and what was the dream? The dream was content of character. Judge a man of the content of character. This is as old as America. It came from Jefferson, a meritocracy, that you don't have to live in a class. Just because you're a Clinton doesn't mean -- if you suck as a Clinton, you don't get the job. You're back to a farmer or whatever it was. It's a meritocracy. You aren't held for the sins of the father, you don't ride on the coattails of the father. That's where we need to get back to. Judge a man by the content of his character.

Okay, let's consider for just a moment the fact that Glenn Beck is apparently so naively ignorant that he believes America in the time of Jefferson was not a rigidly stratified system of classes in which those in power did not benefit immensely from their station in life. We had to go through six presidents before electing one who wasn't born into wealth, and, coincidentally, Beck just last night attacked that president's election as the point “where the country went wrong.”

But what of his exhortation that we not judge people based on “the sins of the father”? A worthy aspiration, to be sure, but Beck is as guilty of this as anyone.

Not one week ago, he spent several minutes inveighing against Barack Obama for the fact that his father, according to Beck, was a Marxist and a communist:

BECK: Communism. That was the dream of his father. That's why he left his son, to go back to Kenya and start a communist country. And that was the dream of his grandfather as well, not necessarily communism or Marxism, but to shake off the shackles of imperialism of Great Britain. That was the dream of his grandfather, his grandfather couldn't get it done. His father then left the United States, abandoned his son, to go back to Kenya to complete the dream of his father. So, Barack Obama -- now this is the dream of three fathers. Barack Obama's grandfather, Barack Obama's father, and is it Barack Obama's dream? What is Barack Obama's dream? You have to ask yourself: what were the dreams of his father? Marxism.

So by all means, let's “get back” to the time in America when people were not judged for their father's sins, because when we get there, we won't have to listen to garbage like this from Glenn Beck.