I don’t watch cable news because I don’t appreciate the absurdly high yelling-to-actual-violence ratio (if you talking heads are gonna shout each other down, at least finish the argument with a knife). But I’ve seen enough clips to get a feel for Glenn Beck, Fox News’s version of a “kind of but not really serious but actually kind of serious” Stephen Colbert. Whether his audience takes him at face value or not, Beck’s anti-intellectual fear-mongering hysteria adds nothing substantive to the nation’s political discourse.

All of that is a way of introducing Jon Stewart’s sudden, unannounced Glenn Beck impression during last night’s “Daily Show” that went on for eight and half minutes. As good as it is, I don’t think I laughed once. I found it more sad than funny. Then I read a list of cats with fraudulent diplomas and pretended the cats were wearing wigs when they received them, and then I felt a lot better.

I’d be more than happy to take every person who hosts a politicized talk show on a cable network, tie them to an anchor covered in razor blades, and drop them in the Pacific over the Mariana Trench.  Olbermann and Bill Maher are impossibly arrogant douchebags, and I’d rather try to F a hungry wolverine than listen to Bill O’Reilly yell at people.  But no one is a bigger retard than Glenn Beck.

Watch the video above, and join me in empathizing with this .gif:

(SITE NEWS: The “What’s On Tonight” feature will return on Sunday.)

Glenn Beck was on Bill O’Reilly’s show last night, and he broke out the rarefied Glenn Beckian levels of crazy, using Barbies and a dollhouse to demonstrate how the government is messing up the investigation of ACORN.  And I don’t want to make this political.  For all I know, the government IS messing up the investigation of ACORN (that was the organization that registered squirrels to vote, right?).

But are the little girls’ dolls necessary?  I feel like I’m watching some bizarro world Stephen Colbert, and my mind gets re-blown every time I think about the possibility that people take Beck seriously.  People don’t take him seriously, right?  RIGHT?  Oh dear God.  **invests in bomb shelters**

[TV Newser via Videogum]

Sadly, that headline is figurative, not literal.  As much as I try to maintain a centrist stance politically, I think we can all agree that Glenn Beck’s insane populist posturing in front of an enlarged Constitution on Fox News richly deserves Stephen Colbert’s skewering.  Either Stephen Colbert’s skewering, or patriotic euthanasia.

I’d prefer the latter, of course.  If only there were kill shelters for ideologues.  Who wouldn’t love that?  Picture Glenn Beck getting a lethal injection, and just try not to hum “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”  Oh, okay.  So now I’m the bad guy?  Just for wanting to watch someone die?

Well, I’ll have you know that wanting to watch someone die is a prerequisite for getting your own show on Fox News.  Maybe I can take over Glenn’s time slot.