Over at Time Magazine, David Von Drehle gives the world a puff-piece on Glenn Beck titled "Mad Man: Is Glenn Beck Bad for America?"

Here's a good way to tell when a story is crap - when it asks a question in the headline and then doesn't answer it. Hell, doesn't even ask it.

Anyway, Von Drehle gives Beck the hero treatment throughout the story.

Beck is 45, tireless, funny, self-deprecating, a recovering alcoholic, a convert to Mormonism, a libertarian and living with ADHD. He is a gifted storyteller with a knack for stitching seemingly unrelated data points into possible conspiracies -- if he believed in conspiracies, which he doesn't, necessarily; he's just asking questions. He's just sayin'.

Von Drehle then goes on to list many of Beck's crazier claims, but never debunks them. Either Von Drehle felt that it wasn't important enough to the story to point out that Beck lies on a daily basis, or perhaps thought the ridiculousness of it all was self-evident. Somehow forgetting that Beck has an audience in the millions.

Von Drehle does his job as journalistic fanboy well, throughout the piece. He even gets in the necessary false equivalency between the left and right:

Between the liberal fantasies about Brownshirts at town halls and the conservative concoctions of brainwashed children goose-stepping to school, you'd think the Palm in Washington had been replaced with a Munich beer hall.

What does Von Drehle avoid mentioning?

The success of the ad boycott against Beck's show.

Beck's hero-worship of W. Cleon Skousen.

Beck's repeated usage of viloent rhetoric.

The word "racism."

Simply put, Von Drehle produced a piece of fan fiction on Glenn Beck and got it published in Time Magazine. To anyone who read the piece, they'd think Beck was a lovable, harmless, rascal, just shaking things up.

Is Glenn Beck Bad for America? Who knows, Von Drehle never got around to asking.

-WKW