George Will Channels Beck In Attacking Woodrow Wilson, Progressives

Glenn Beck may have departed Fox News, but his wacky crusades live on, in some unlikely places through some unlikely messengers.

In a discussion of the Constitution on the July 3 edition of ABC's This Week, host Christiane Amanpour asked panelist George Will whether he thought the Constitution was “under siege,” as conservative activists have claimed. Will responded: “It has been for a century. Woodrow Wilson, probably the rest of the progressive movement, set out to say, the Constitution was all very well once, but now we're a more complicated society with more grand ambitions for the government, and therefore what the founders did, which was to put the government on a short leash, has to be undone, we have to cut the leash on government. And that's what the progressive project has been through a century.”

Later, when Amanpour asked Will who his favorite founding father was, Will said that it was James Madison, adding a weird Ivy League-centric twist: “The argument we're having today is whether James Madison of the Princeton class of 1771 can save the Constitution from Woodrow Wilson of the Princeton class of 1879 and the progressive movement. It's an intramural argument at Princeton.”

Sound familiar? Check out these clips from Beck's TV and radio shows:

What's next? Will warning us not to tease the panther?