You were expecting something else? You were expecting a journalist from a glossy mag or major metro newspaper to even hint within a Beck profile that his embrace of paranoid, often irrational anti-Obama rhetoric might somehow be problematic?

Sorry, that's not how the press treats right-wing media figures: the hate speech is never to be addressed in detail. So New York dutifully goes through the motions. Beck's a “populist”? Check. (Apparently he's the pro-AIG big bonus type of populist.) Beck's a self-described “rodeo clown”? Check.

Zzzzz.

Here are a couple nuggets that New York absolutely, positively could not include in its Beck puff piece:

--Beck claims Americorops bill “basically indoctrinates your child into community service though the federal government.”

--Beck claims “the government is a heroin pusher using smiley-faced fascism to grow the nanny state.”

--Beck claims Obama “is so clearly” a socialist. “He's surrounded himself with Marxists his whole life.”

--Beck claims the U.S. is on course to make the same “mistakes that Germany made during the Weimar Republic.”

--Beck suggests the federal government might be building concentration camps inside America. (A claim Beck could not “debunk.”)

But all of that goes down the memory hole at New York. Not a sentence, or even a phrase, to give readers a sample of Beck's unhinged rhetoric.