Glenn Beck announced his impending departure from Fox News in April, and tonight the clown prince of illogical fear-mongering will air his final show. To mark the occasion, Media Matters made this epic video of Beck “highlights,” if you can call them that.

After about a minute and twenty seconds of watching this, my eye started to twitch, but I decided to stick it out because I owe it to you, the reader, to give a fair account of the news and clips I share. But then, 1:49 into the video — this really happened — my computer froze. I couldn’t even ctrl + alt + delete out of Chrome — I had to hold the power button down and restart my laptop. Clearly, my computer’s failure is part of a conspiracy by pretentious technocratic progressives who want to stifle Beck’s egalitarian message of freedom for the common man. And I couldn’t be happier about it.

[via BuzzFeed]

On last night’s “Daily Show,” Jon Stewart addressed the end of Glenn Beck’s show with his own extended impression of Beck. Yes, it’s a caricature that Stewart has used before, but I found it funnier this time — probably because the fear-mongering specter of Beck is on his way out of the media landscape (if only for a little while).

I’ve got the videos below, and it’s pretty entertaining if you enjoy Stewart’s comedy. At the very least, it’s worth it to see Glenn Beck compare hosting his cable news show to Paul Revere’s ride. What a completely accurate metaphor in all ways. I was just thinking how my television blog is similar to the Federalist Papers.

Pundit Dog thinks it's a ruff break for Glenn.

It’s a great year for people who don’t want their political opinions from jackasses flailing around in hysterics: first Keith Olbermann got fired from MSNBC, and now Fox News has just announced that Glenn Beck’s show will leave the air later this year. Fox News and Beck’s Mercury Radio Arts released a joint statement today that mentioned no specific end date for the show and especially vague plans for future projects together.

“Glenn Beck is a powerful communicator, a creative entrepreneur and a true success by anybody’s standards,” said Roger Ailes, Chairman and CEO of Fox News. “I look forward to continuing to work with him.”

“I truly believe that America owes a lot to Roger Ailes and Fox News,” Beck said in a statement. “I cannot repay Roger for the lessons I’ve learned and will continue to learn from him and I look forward to starting this new phase of our partnership.” [via EW]

Of course, there was no mention of how Beck has lost advertisers or how his audience has dropped more than 40% in the cable news demo this year. I’m sure that unspecified plans for future projects with Fox News will have much greater clout than hosting an hour-long news show. *cough* FIRED! *cough cough*

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.