On today's edition of the three-hour conspiracy theory jam session that is Glenn Beck's radio program, the talk radio virtuoso found time to revive a long-debunked myth about President Obama's interpretation of the Constitution:

BECK: And the way that the problem should be fixed is, according to Cloward and Piven in '66, is a national wage. What is it that the president says -- he doesn't like the Constitution because it's a charter of negative liberties, when it should be a charter of positive liberties. Positive liberties. Wait a minute -- that sounds a little like FDR and what he was working on. Hey, isn't that what Cass Sunstein's book is about? A charter of positive liberties. Yeah, that's right. It's a -- oh yeah, I remember, it's a guaranteed job, and a guaranteed wage, and guaranteed housing, and guaranteed health care. Oh my gosh, wait a minute, hold it just a second. All that sounds a little like communism.

Oh, the joy of a myth that never dies. The comments to which Beck is apparently referring were spoken by Obama in a 2001 interview with a Chicago radio station. Other mischaracterizations of the interview made their way from the Drudge Report to Fox News on-screen graphics to segments on Sean Hannity's radio and television programs. And Rush Limbaugh's. Then it cropped up again in Andrew McCarthy's book The Grand Jihad. But in reality, Obama was explaining that the Supreme Court under Earl Warren had maintained the historical trend of interpreting the Constitution as a “charter of negative liberties.” Such an interpretation views the Constitution as a document which, as Obama explained, “says what the states can't do to you, says what the federal government can't do to you.” From the 2001 interview:

OBAMA: But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society.

And, to that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren court, it wasn't that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as it's been interpreted, and Warren court interpreted it in the same way that, generally, the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties -- says what the states can't do to you, says what the federal government can't do to you, but it doesn't say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf, and that hasn't shifted.

And one of the -- I think the tragedies of the civil rights movement was, because the civil rights movements became so court-focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing, and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change. And, in some ways, we still suffer from that.

Obama did not say that he, as Beck puts it, “doesn't like the Constitution.”

Beck has previously taken a hatchet to the interview, editing out the two instances in which Obama referred to the Constitution as “remarkable.” As for Beck's suggestion that Cass Sunstein favors altering the Constitution to accommodate FDR's proposed “Second Bill of Rights,” that was bunk when he first said it, and it still is.