Planet Wingnuttia News for Wednesday.

Glenn Beck elicits guffaws on 'Morning Joe': "Somebody get this blubbering buffoon a Kleenex!'

More Beck Babble: Wind power needs nukes to work
Just to be a jerk, Glenn Beck yesterday used his show to demonstrate -- like a number of his fellow right-wingers -- his utter contempt for Earth Hour: running his klieg lights at full blast to show how much energy he could waste. Yeah, that's the kind of responsible rhetoric we need more of. Whatever.
But the really special moment in the broadcast came when he started talking about wind power as an alternative form of energy with Tom Borelli of the "Free Enterprise Action Fund" -- a right-wing anti-environmental outfit -- about the Obama energy plan, and this burst out:

Beck: You can't make wind energy work without nuclear energy as well. Wind stops --
Borelli: You know that, but Congress doesn't know that.
Beck: Use your common sense! Hey America! Use common sense here! Let just try this out!
Wind, when it blows, makes energy. When it stops, you can't store it, so what's making the energy? Wind energy doesn't work without something else making energy for when the wind stops, which it does -- especially if Al Gore controls the temperature, and all the winds and everything else, so we never have blowy days!

O’Reilly smears ThinkProgress once again, claims we attacked a rape victim and her family. Monday on The Factor, Bill O’Reilly addressed ThinkProgress in his “Reality Check” portion of the show, “a segment set up to defeat deceit.” And of course, O’Reilly proceeded to peddle deceit, claiming that “far left zealots…attacked a rape victim and her family because they asked me to speak at their fundraiser.” Wrong. We never attacked the Alexa Foundation; we simply highlighted quotes from O’Reilly that were unsympathetic towards a rape victim. O’Reilly has never explained why he implied that women who dress in a certain way or consume too much alcohol should perhaps expect to be raped and murdered.

Gingrich: We should have Singapore-style drug tests for Americans Newt Gingrich followed Bill O'Reilly's lead Monday night on The O'Reilly Factor, talking about how Americans' drug use -- and not horribly wrong-headed American drug laws -- are responsible for the border wars being waged by Mexican cartels. O'Reilly seemed to think that Singapore might be a model to follow, since things work so swell over there:

O'Reilly: I don't know whether you know this, but I did one of my papers at Harvard on this -- on how to reduce demand for drugs. But the United States has never figured it out. You can't lock up drug users, I mean, that doesn't work. And you can't force them into rehab, you have to want rehab, and even if you want it, it's very hard to get off hard drugs and alcohol. Very hard. What you can do, though, is sanction people along the way. And this is what they do in Singapore. If you're caught possessing drugs -- and that means drugs in your bloodstream, they have a little hair thing, and they put it in there -- then you have to go to mandatory rehab. And they have centers where you go. Now, they have no drug problem in Singapore at all, number one, because they hang drug dealers -- they execute them. And number two, the market is very thin, because when they catch you using, you go away with a mandatory rehab. You go to some rehab center, which they have, which the government has built. The United States does not have the stomach for that. We don't have the stomach for that, Mr. Speaker.

Gingrich: Well, I think it's time we get the stomach for that, Bill. And I think we need a program -- I would dramatically expand testing.

I think we have -- and I agree with you. I would try to use rehabilitation, I'd make it mandatory. And I think we have every right as a country to demand of our citizens that they quit doing illegal things which are funding, both in Afghanistan and in Mexico and in Colombia, people who are destroying civilization.

Limbaugh: If Obama fails, 'America is saved'

Evidently, Andrew Klavan thinks the problem liberals have with Rush Limbaugh is that they don't actually listen to his shows. But then, as Media Matters observes, Klavan doesn't seem to have listened much to Limbaugh himself. Still, such stroking is the liquid naphtha that fuels Limbaugh's ego, so sure enough, he was touting the piece yesterday on his radio show, as Simon Maloy at the Limbaugh Wire recounts. Not only that, it rocketed him to new heights of rhetorical excess: Based on what we've seen with General Motors and the banks, if he fails, America is saved. Barack Obama's policies and their failure is the only hope we've got to maintain the America of our founding.