In yet another effort at conspiracy theorizing, Glenn Beck placed his target squarely on environmental cultists who are sterilizing your drinking water and limiting your energy use though secret control of your thermostat. No, really -- he even complained that pro-choice activists have not protested non-existent laws prohibiting more than “one child per family.” But his real victim was Victorian literature.

It all began when Beck realized that these enviro-cultists were taking over government to establish a utopia with fewer humans, more polar bears, and government control of a woman's uterus. But the real fun began when Beck decided to cite Dickens to emphasize his point:

BECK: We don't know what this ultimate utopia will be, but as we approach Christmas this year, the climate cult, to me, is looking more and more like Scrooge. I believe it was Scrooge -- you know, before the change and the Tiny Tim, “I'd like more please” -- I think it was before all of that, when Charles Dickens wrote the words for Scrooge's mouth, “Well, if we all are going to die anyway, perhaps we had better do it and decrease the surplus population.” I, for one, don't believe there's a surplus population. How about you?

Now, it's possible that Beck owns a Charles Dickens anthology that contains both Tiny Tim and the phrase “I'd like more please.” Actually, that's technically not possible. But an anthology might have both Tiny Tim and the phrase, “Please, sir, I want some more.” Those words would, of course, be spoken by Oliver Twist, the epyonymous orphan in Dickens' novel, not Tiny Tim, perhaps best recalled for appending his father's Christmas toast by exclaiming, “God bless us every one.”

See, contrary to Beck's mistelling of A Christmas Carol, Scrooge did not change after Tiny Tim's brave call for more in the face of want; it was Tiny Tim's expression of being blessed despite his family's obvious want that moved Scrooge.

But having proved allergic to the rules of spelling and children's games, I suppose we can't expect Beck to stay within the universe of a single piece of literature to make his point.