BECK: METAPHOR-CHALLENGED -- OR HAVING MARTYR FANTASIES AGAIN?

Media Matters and Steve Benen are amused by some new Glenn Beck whining -- on Monday he complained about journalists "looking into my past" (don't like being a public figure, Glenn? hey, get a real job), and he said:

It's you and me and the FOX News Channel -- the Alamo for truth.

Does Beck not quite understand what actually happened at the Alamo? I don't think that's what's going on here. I think he's just wallowing, yet again, in the delightful fantasy that he's going to be martyred someday for the right-wing Cause. (Fox will be martyred also -- and you, too, if you're a Beck/Fox fan.)

I told you last week about another Beck pronouncement:

I am willing to go into the night broke for what I believe in. I am willing to lose everything. I am willing, I am willing to be alone. It doesn't bother me.... Shoot me in the head. I'm not going to violate what I believe is right.

This is not what he fears -- this is what he wants. (No, I don't think he really wants it to happen. But he really, really likes thinking about it.)

Why the obsession with being killed for a cause? I think that's Beck's brain chemistry. But I think it so happens to have great appeal to the wingnut masses.

Wingnuts always feel besieged. Even when their heroes ran the whole federal government and the president they loved was near 90% in the polls, they felt besieged. Wingnuts like to feel besieged.

Beck (by his own admission) has a screw loose, and he seems to wallow in the sense that he's under siege more than most wingnuts. But that's a big part of what makes him so popular on the right. His viewers savor his premonitions of imminent doom for their kind.

So, yeah, I think when he said "Alamo" he knew exactly what he was saying.

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Steve Benen, by the way, points out that Roger Ailes of Fox News used an Alamo metaphor in reference to Fox News early in the Obama presidency. But note that we learned thisfrom Beck himself:

"I see this as the Alamo," Ailes said, according to Beck. "If I just had somebody who was willing to sit on the other side of the camera until the last shot is fired, we'd be fine."

Did Ailes really say this? Is it an accurate representation of Ailes's thinking -- or of Beck's synapses?