It's the week before Christmas, traditionally the time of year when Fox News' hosts go on vacation, leaving behind clip shows, digging up guest hosts, or simply airing reruns to fill the air time. After rounding out last week by turning his show over to Fox resident Truther Andrew Napolitano on Thursday and re-airing his Wilmington special on Friday, Glenn Beck today provided his audience with a special on “the history of revolutions” and the influence of “radical revolutionaries” on the Obama administration.

And wouldn't you know it? He kicked off the special with discussion of “the world's revolutionary in chief, George Soros”:

BECK: Along with currencies, Soros also collapses regimes. With his Open Society Fund, which was founded in 1979, Soros has helped fund the Velvet Revolution in the Czech Republic, the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, the Rose Revolution in Georgia. He also helped to engineer coups in Slovakia, Croatia, and Yugoslavia. So what is his target now? Us. America.

But in their rush to get out of the office and get their holidays started, Beck and company let right-wing author Richard Poe undermine Beck's claim that Soros is dangerous because he “collapses regimes” and America is “his target now.”

In the first part of his multi-day special on Soros, Beck claimed:

BECK: Along with currencies, Soros also collapses regimes. With his Open Society Fund, which was founded in 1979, Soros has helped fund the Velvet Revolution in the Czech Republic, the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, the Rose Revolution in Georgia. He also helped to engineer coups in Slovakia, Croatia, and Yugoslavia. So what is his target now? Us. America.

The next day, Beck said that Soros was “notorious for collapsing... regimes all around the world.”

But tonight, Poe started to peel back the curtain on this claim, pointing out that Soros had backed “the Solidarity movement in Poland and ... the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia.” Poe acknowledged that in these cases, Soros worked to bring down “communist regimes, which is good.”

As far as I can tell, this is the first time that Beck's program has acknowledged that the Soros-backed Velvet Revolution overthrew a communist regime, and the first time it has noted Soros' work with Solidarity. For that matter, it's probably the first time the program has hosted someone positively characterizing anything Soros has done.

Of course, Poe goes on to say that “then, he started overthrowing all kinds of regimes,” and has “bragged about it in many cases, that he overthrew this government, he helped overthrow that government.”

In his discredited book The Shadow Party, Poe and conspiracist co-author David Horowitz provide one such example of Soros' “bragg[ing]”:

But the fall of Communism did not bring an end to Soros' programs of subversion, nor seem to lessen their pace. “My foundations contributed to democratic regime change in Slovakia in 1998, Croatia in 1999, and Yugoslavia in 2000, mobilizing civil society to get rid of Vladimir Meciar, Franjo Tudjman, and Slobodan Milosevic, respectively,” Soros boasts. [Page 232]

Contrary to Poe's claim that Soros was “overthrowing all kinds of regimes,” the groups he supported acted against autocratic and corrupt governments. Milosevic died awaiting trial for war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity; Tudjman's “rule became increasingly autocratic” and featured the state shutting down newspapers that opposed him, according to the BBC; Meciar's “government was widely considered illiberal, discriminatory and corrupt, practicing crony politics,” and he once allegedly ordered the kidnapping of the son of a political rival, according to The New York Times; the Orange Revolution in Ukraine was a non-violent response to a disputed election that involved poisonings and assassination attempts; and Georgia's Rose Revolution came in response to what BBC called “the flawed results of a parliamentary election,” and brought about the presidency of Mikheil Saakashvili, who was praised by Glenn Beck in 2008 for his Western-friendly reforms.