Damn that Woodrow Wilson Anyway

"Don't know much about history" -- the words of a popular Sam Cooke song from 1998. It ought to be the anthem of Glenn Beck University.

The Beckster has gone off on any number of rants about the Progressive Movement of the turn of the 20th Century, but his main whipping boy seems to be Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States, comparing him to -- and crediting him with -- the rise Adolf Hitler, eugenics, the communist threat, and just about every other evil horror of the 20th Century that you can think of.

I will admit that there's a hell of a lot about Wilson that I do not admire: His lying about getting the US into WWI, his continuing segregation of the Federal bureaucracy, his overt racism (he once described the KKK-celebratory film Birth of a Nation as "history written with lightning") but he also was part of a political movement that culminated in the Federal Reserve Act, the Federal Trade Commission Act, the Clayton Antitrust Act, the Federal Farm Loan Act and America's first-ever federal progressive income tax in the Revenue Act of 1913.

So why does The Beckster vilify Wilson with such statements as "This is an evil SOB, man...One evil SOB -- bad dude!...I mean, he's a dirtbag racist, is he not?...I hate this guy. I don't even want to show his picture. No, don't do it. Don't show it. I hate this guy...He was a horror show, wasn't he? A horror show, possibly the spookiest president we've ever had."?

Well, my guess is that it wasn't because of his snobbish elite-Southern-gentleman racism but rather, since Wilson was in part responsible for all of those commie lefty pinko fellow-traveler socialists laws listed above, all of which were passed by Congress and signed by Wilson in his first term, he makes a handy target on which the know-nothing meathead Teabagger Beck can pin all of the blame for the things that have gone 'wrong" with this country since 1912.

Never mind that the Progressive Movement's biggest champion and most outspoken proponent was a guy named Theodore Roosevelt, who is apparently being let off the hook by The Beckster only because he was a Republican. Never mind the fact that TR, were he alive today, would be shunned by Glenn Beck and his own fellow-travelers in the Teabagger movement and the rest of that wholly-owned-subsidiary-of-the-wealthy-corporations, the Republican Party.

Be sure to read the Washington Post's Dana Milbank story, Glenn Beck is obsessed with Hitler and Woodrow Wilson. (I'm just saying.) for further clarification of Beck's uniquely warped perspective on American -- and world -- history.