‘I Like Glenn Beck Because He’s Fun to Watch’
29th August 2010
Tim Cavanaugh ‘fesses up to his guilty secret.
Yes, he’s trying, as Moynihan memorably put it, to learn history and teach it at the same time. But so what? Like the dumpy woman with low self-esteem we all dream of, Beck makes up in enthusiasm what he lacks in natural gifts. I like the sense that he’s bringing you his findings as fast as they come in. You get the impression that two weeks ago Beck had never heard of Woodrow Wilson, yet now he has figured out that Woodrow Wilson was one of the most evil people of the 20th century, and he wants to tell everybody. There’s something fun about that, a performance that invites you to help fill in details and fix errors. It’s certainly something you don’t see anywhere else on TV, a medium populated almost entirely by people who are more cocksure about everything than I am about anything.
And he’s right about Woodrow Wilson.