Glenn Beck was all about American Pie (the good old America kind, not the movie kind). Literally and metaphorically. I know I’ve speculated many times that Beck may be the next Oprah but tonight he appeared to be gunning for Martha Stewart land.

Purely speculation on my part. I actually have no idea what Glenn Beck is planning for his Restoring Honor rally at the end of August. But I am willing to hazard a guess it will sound a lot like today’s long, strangely staged, operatic diatribe against, in the smaller sense, the media who called Fox News racist for their reporting on Shirley Sherrod, and in the larger sense progressives.

Truth be told I haven’t been paying that much attention to Glenn Beck‘s recent tirade on American civil rights and the supposed Black Panther debacle but this was hard to miss. Here’s Glenn’s version of how the Civil Rights movement came to a close.

If you watch this clip on mute it could sort of pass for some sort of weird cable children’s show (sans the pipe)…nice houses, pretty pink cars, a chalkboard! With the volume on, however, it’s obviously a whole other ballgame. One having to do with evil progressives who think you are “too stupid and have to be dragged to the right answers.”

On Friday Glenn Beck devoted this week’s “Founding Friday” show to the women who built this country. I’m not sure what it says about the state of education and media (and Hollywood…ahem!) in general that Beck is leading the charge to (broadly) inform the country about women’s roles in the founding of this country but there you have it. Glenn Beck hear me roar!

Glenn Beck‘s self-imposed hiatus from major politico-industrial socialist conspiracies for the past couple of weeks to promote some books and bash Woodrow Wilson is over. On today’s program, Beck found a nefarious plot by the brains at Fannie Mae to fully control personal use of energy through a brand new patented safety plug.

Sometimes a map of Manhattan is just…well, phallic. During his show tonight Glenn Beck opted to illustrate his pro Israeli flotilla argument using a map of Manhattan. Beck was attempting to demonstrate how the American equivalent of the flotilla incident would be if the Saudis tried to dock on lower Manhattan. Who knew there was such a thing as geography as sex ed.

Well you can’t accuse Glenn Beck of not owning up to his mistakes…again and again. On today’s show Beck followed up on Friday’s apology for his controversial remark making fun of President Obama‘s daughter Malia. Beck said that he left his radio show on Friday and “I told myself I wasn’t making fun of the kids, and I believed it.” That is until he got home to his wife who set him straight.

During a television-side chat today Glenn Beck told a (yes…teary-eyed) tale of a recent excursion he and his family took to the Cirque du Soleil opening gala at which Beck found himself one row in front of James Gandolfini, of whom he is a fan. As Beck tells it, when he stood up to take his five-year-old son to the bathroom he reached over and introduced himself to Gandolfini (they apparently have a mutual friend) and shook his hand….at which point Gandolfini apparently said “what is Satan doing here?”

Fight fire with….wieners? Glenn Beck dropped what has felt like a days-long rant against century-old politicians and reverted to fighting form tonight to push back against accusations from New York Rep. Anthony Weiner that Beck and Goldline, which sponsors his show, were running a racket and “ripping off customers.”

Glenn Beck got another wild Daily Show treatment last night, this time courtesy of Lewis Black…and the Nazis. Truth be told, this is one of the funniest Daily Show Beck takedowns I’ve seen in a while. The subject: Glenn Beck’s habit of drawing tenuous comparisons between just about everything and Nazi Germany. Said Black: “Glenn Beck has Nazi Tourettes.”

Last week Glenn Beck turned a lot of media heads when he told Fox & Friends that Times Sq. Bomb suspect Faisal Shahzad was a citizen and as such had all the “rights under the Constitution” including Miranda rights.

Despite plenty of speculation that he might, Glenn Beck did not start tonight’s show by launching into a conspiracy theory about SCOTUS nominee Elena Kagan and her Princeton thesis on socialism (though he did talk about it on his radio show today). Instead he was up in arms about President Obama and his dismissal of the iPod and iPad and XBox and blogs. Why does the President hate information?

If it seems like it’s been a while since you’ve seen a new clip of Glenn Beck getting emotional during his broadcast, then today is your lucky day! For those not familiar with Beck’s programing schedule, today was another of his “Founder’s Friday” – a recurring theme in which Beck dedicates the show to, you guessed it, a Founding Father of the good ole U.S. of A. Today’s subject, George Washington, apparently moved Beck choke back tears

Presumably it was just a matter of time before someone linked the Arizona Law to the Times Sq. Bomber — they represent the two hottest button topics in the nation at the moment. A stretch? Not for Glenn Beck and his pipe.

Wow. A moment of silence for Glenn Beck. Literally. Actually it was more than a moment, it was about two minutes worth of silence…on live TV. I don’t know how many cable hosts could pull off not talking — with not having any talking — for an entire segment, but Beck managed to pull it [...]

Is Glenn Beck’s time in the media klieg lights coming to a close? The latest Nielsen numbers reveal that Beck’s audience is down nearly 30% since the start of the year. But why the drop (if, indeed, there even is one)? Is the country growing bored of chalkboards, or is the larger issue that the nation is merely out-Becking Glenn Beck?

Even as the first whispers of immigration reform began to surface in the wake of Obamacare, it was obvious that Glenn Beck would take an uncommon approach to the subject. In fact, he has taken very little approach to it at all, because illegal immigration is only one in a four-step process to dilute the American voting pool with Marxists, felons, and Puerto Ricans.

Try not to choke on the irony. Glenn Beck is enraged that people have been comparing the new immigration law in Arizona to Nazi Germany. Yes. Really. He’s mad. Says Beck: Arizona sure is putting the AZ in Nazi. I really hate to rain on the hate parade, but could we slow down for just a second here and ask: You’re out of your mind?”

Glenn Beck attempted to tackle the financial crisis today and instead got…derailed with strange (mixed) free market metaphors that revolved around train tracks. Example (except this isn’t a metaphor): Hitler used the trains to send people to Auschwitz, Stalin used the trains to send people to the Gulag, our trains (metaphorically) resulted in the light bulb. He goes on.

Glenn Beck has still obviously not gotten over being called seditious and compared to Timothy McVeigh. Yesterday, it was Joe Klein’s turn to incur the wrath of his ’50s TV fireside chat; today was Bill Clinton‘s. And if the left could get away with comparing him to McVeigh, Beck seemed to figure, he was going to turn the tables on them and compare Oklahoma City to the tragedy in Waco, Texas.

After a weekend that was filled with Tea Party talk, and accusations from Joe Klein that Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin were close to being seditious, Beck opted to follow up today’s (Patriot Day) tweet with a long opening monologue that felt like a strange combination of a fireside chat meets an AA meeting. He is not seditious.

Today’s Glenn Beck Program was all about the troops– namely, the reason America is doing so poorly in Afghanistan has nothing to do with them. It has to do with the “politicians and their grimy little fingers on everything,” so, today, Glenn Beck performed a thought experiment where those politicians don’t exist, and he is King of America. Surprise: King Beck would be “the opposite of what Obama is.”

The Plan is back! Beck is apparently spending the whole week discussing elements of it and today’s show was focused on the economy, jobs, and fixing the deficit. Here’s the part that caught my attention, particularly in light of today’s Pulitzer announcement: Beck apparently thinks it’s just a matter of time till the Times is bought out by the government.

Where do you take a conversation when the only condition is that both parties disagree on everything and neither is open to persuasion? Most cable news conversations go something like this, with both sides just shout unintelligibly at each other until the commercial break. Glenn Beck and Al Sharpton decided to restrict the conversation to things they agree on: Martin Luther King, Jr. was good for America, people tend to have beliefs, and freedom of speech is a fundamental right.