Glenn Greenwald: Glenn Beck and left-right confusion

Last night during his CBS interview with Katie Couric, Glenn Beck said he may have voted for Hillary Clinton and that "John McCain would have been worse for the country than Barack Obama." This comment predictably spawned confusion among some liberals and anger among some conservatives. But even prior to that, there had been a palpable increase in the right-wing attacks on Beck -- some motivated by professional competition for the incredibly lucrative industry of right-wing opinion-making, some due to understandable discomfort with his crazed and irresponsible rhetoric, but much of it the result of Beck's growing deviation from GOP (and neoconservative) dogma. Increasingly, there is great difficulty in understanding not only Beck's political orientation but, even more so, the movement that has sprung up around him. Within that confusion lies several important observations about our political culture, particularly the inability to process anything that does not fall comfortably into the conventional "left-right" dichotomy through which everything is understood.