Despite evidence to the contrary, Beck likes to pretend that his endless cascade of violent, apocalyptic rhetoric doesn't have any negative real-world consequences. When mentally unbalanced individuals take his doom-mongering to heart and use it as a justification to attempt or threaten violent acts -- as they have in the past, repeatedly -- he always offers up the same excuse: a couple token references per week to how much he hates violence completely absolve him of any responsibility.

It's episodes like tonight's that show just how hollow that excuse really is. Here Beck is comparing his warnings of the threat posed by septuagenarian academic Frances Fox Piven to earlier warnings of the threat posed by Osama Bin Laden:

BECK: STORM, the Ella Baker Center, Van Jones, all participate in rallies when they are -- they're standing up for a guy who kills a cop. I stand by my pledge tonight. The Hutaree Militia that claims to be on the right, that claims to say “We are gonna kill cops,” and Frances Fox Piven who claims to be on the left, who says “We need riots like that in America,” are dangerous.

Nobody listened to me in 1999 when I said, “Osama Bin Laden will attack the city of New York. Will you fight him when there is blood and bodies in the streets of New York?” Nobody listened to me. Nobody listened. And is anybody-- is anybody really listening now?

In hindsight, exactly how would Glenn Beck have wanted people to respond had they known in advance about bin Laden's plans to attack the United States? How does he honestly anticipate people will react today, hearing him lament that nobody listened to his warnings about bin Laden in 1999*, all the while exhorting them to listen now as he warns about the “dangerous” enemy Francis Fox Piven?

*The most likely explanation for why nobody took Glenn Beck seriously at the time is that he spent the late nineties making fun of bin Laden's name.