Kristol vs Beck: Two Go In, One Comes Out

Thers on the eschaton board refers to a post on the differences between Glenn Beck and William Kristol by Steve Benen:

Over the weekend, The Weekly Standard's William Kristol, a Fox News contributor, had seen enough. "[H]ysteria is not a sign of health," Kristol wrote in a new column. "When Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left, he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. He's marginalizing himself, just as his predecessors did back in the early 1960s."

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2011_02/027882.php

---Benen also cites such comments in the National Review.

Beck's crazier in affect and presentation than is Kristol, and frequently goes off into paranoid territory. And if you aren't a Beckist, you're unlikely to be converted or even find him sympathetic with further exposure. So Kristol's trying to legitimize himself and his cobelievers in mainstream politics, contrasting themselves with Beck. I do agree with Thers that Kristol and the other neoconservatives are, too, reality-challenged, and that their views are immune to the challenge that repeated, catastrophic failure when put into practice should bring.

So, in that sense, the dissent on the right isn't enough, and will never be enough. But when such as Kristol denounce the Pope of the Tea Party in such terms, it has political implications as (gack) the 2012 primary season approaches, and they start to realize the gap between what it'll take to get the Republican nomination and what it'll take to win the general election.