” I think his primary motivations are, and have always been, money and fame. That’s a constant throughout his career. Long before he found God and George Washington during his early transition to talk radio, he dreamt of making it big as a syndicated Top 40 guy. His media empire has been a dream since childhood, although the content is probably a surprise even to him. But just because he’s a businessman who knows exactly what he’s doing does not mean that everything coming out of his mouth is part of a charade. I think he really does have the twisted hard-right politics he professes to hold. He doesn’t know enough to know better. He learned just about everything he knows about history and politics from AM radio and crazy Mormon Birchers like Cleon Skousen. A lot of what people find hard to understand about Beck is a result of rank ignorance.” []

” But [Glenn] Beck is clearly full of hatred to this day, for himself, for the world, for his political opponents. More than one former colleague believes he was diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder in the 90s, likely bipolar, and that he took lithium on top of his recreational drugs and booze until he went clean in mid-90s. So you start with that as a baseline, together with a history of depression, throw in some megalomania and ADHD, for which Beck takes Big Pharma speed, sprinkle it with some dry drunk fairy dust and an instinctive paranoia, and you have a recipe for a freak show.” []

“Beck has been fake crying for at least a decade. At his Top 40 station in New Haven, his ex-partner told me he’d get emotional, cut to commercial, dry up to order a bacon-and-cheese, then start crying as soon as he was on-air again. One of his colleagues in Tampa told me the same thing. This is not to say that Beck is not an emotional wreck who cries a lot. He definitely does. But I think the way he incorporates it into his performance is a combination of embarrassingly deep emotional neediness and a shameless desire to manipulate his audience, which apparently is willing to give him a pass on the crying because they think at bottom he is authentic. And it’s worth noting that the neediness seems to cut both ways. Often Glenn Beck feels like nothing so much as an episode of Mr. Rogers.”
— Alexander Zaitchik, author of “Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Nonsense,” (Wiley 2010) from an interview with Media Matters’ Joe Strupp on June 3, 2010.

Doesn’t this description of Beck remind you of a certain person who was once appointed by a 5-4 Supreme Court decision to the US presidency?