For all the awful and reprehensible things Glenn Beck says and does, it's rare I find myself disgusted with the Fox News host. But it happened last night.

If you didn't see the show, Beck suddenly found himself concerned for the safety of President Obama:

BECK: Now, why is the president himself in trouble? Well, let me use him [Van Jones] as an example, a 9/11 truther -- another guy surrounding the president. OK, 9/11 truthers. Here's a guy who thought the government was evil enough that it would murder thousands of U.S. citizens. Just blow 'em up. Destroy a building and kill 3,000 people.

Well, gosh, are these people like you? Do you think that? Do you think anyone who does think that we could just kill our own people should be near the president? I mean, he thinks anybody who sits or sat in the chair of the presidency must be evil. He goes to church with a guy who thinks that America intentionally murdered people throughout history. Put yourself in the mindset of a 9/11 truther. You have access to the president of the United States, the guy who has always been evil. You think now that he was on your side, but now, if he goes soft, he's joined the cabal capable of murdering people, he promised you a revolution.

Do you think it's safe to have an individual like that around the president of the United States? Are you comfortable with that?

Well, let me tell you something. You might think this is crazy, oh, that stuff would never happen. Let me show you what was said on left-wing radio today. Thanks to Newsbusters.org, they just posted this. “You crazy blank, you right-wingers, do you not understand that the people you hold up as heroes bombed your expletive country? Do you not understand that Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly are as complicit of the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attack as any one of those expletive 15 who came from Saudi Arabia? Don't you get that?”

As a guy -- I'll tell you some day -- as a guy who has to have unbelievable security because of people like that, let me tell you what these people are capable of.

By the way, in a related story, why did the White House have the hearing today on the gatecrashers? Remember the gatecrashers? They pleaded the fifth. Do you think the White House or Congress had that story planted today, to have those hearings today to bury it in a busy news day while everyone else was distracted?

Please pray for our Secret Service, make sure that they do their job. Dear God, protect our president.

I have no doubt that Glenn Beck does not wish any harm upon President Obama. But this is disgusting and little more than a bank-shot smear of both President Obama and his advisors. He's saying -- in a complete absence of evidence, sense, and decency -- that the president's advisors are crazed would-be assassins, and implicit in the criticism is that President Obama is irresponsible enough to put crazed would-be assassins in positions of power where they have access to him. And then, as if that weren't enough, Beck has the gall to use prayer as a weapon against his political opponents.

It's moments like these when I'm brought back to Beck's attack on President Obama as a “racist” and Fox News' refusal to pursue any punitive action against him. At the time, NBC's First Read summed up the situation perfectly: “There was a time when outrageous rants like this would actually cost the ranters their jobs. But not anymore; if anything, it's now encouraged.”