Ben Stein: proof positive that ideology rots a brain

Fresh off of making an attrocious anti-science propaganda film that equates evolutionary science with Nazism, Ben Stein went on CNN HN's Glenn Beck show to participate in the usual Beck cartoon conservatism

STEIN: I want -- I'm glad you brought up this Denver thing. I don't like the idea of Senator Obama giving his acceptance speech in front of 75,000 wildly cheering people. That is not the way we do things in political parties in the United States of America. We have a contained number of people in an arena. Seventy-five-thousand people at an outdoor sports palace, well, that's something the Fuehrer would have done. And I think whoever is advising Senator Obama to do this is bringing up all kinds of very unfortunate images from the past.

BECK: Well, yeah, you know what? I've been -- I've been saying that we're headed towards a Mussolini-style presidency forever.

STEIN: Well, I think --

BECK: I mean it's crazy.

STEIN: It's a scary situation. I mean, I think he has to recognize some bounds on his own ego. I understand politicians are politicians because they have ego deficit problems and they try to cure them by having lots of worshipand adulation and adoration. But 75,000 people screaming at an outdoor arena, that's just too much. It's just -- it's scarily authoritarian.

You know what I find scarily authoritarian? The President of the United States of America asserting the right to abrogate any law or the Constitution itself as a matter of national security at his discretion. I find the President asserting the right to designate American citizens "enemy combatants" and then lock them up indefinitely scarily authoritarian. I find the President and his lawyers saying that national security concerns make previous law obsolete and therefore torture is now legal scarily authoritarian. And I find the totalitarian illogic of this administration scarily authoritarian.

Of course, we must remember that conservativists like Beck and Stein don't believe in the rule of law. They believe in the rule of a Leader. Which is why Beck and Stein don't have a problem with Bush or Nixon (see here for Bein Stein being a lunatic in regards to Nixon) making a mockery of our laws and violating the civil liberties of administration critics. But the prospect of having an Other - The Liberal Fascist Communist S-P enemy - in power is unacceptable. That spells tyranny!

So it doesn't matter that Obama's speech isn't going to be one in which he rallies the crowd to nationalistic furor while directing their emotions against a scapegoated domestic enemy. It is merely a function of the fact that he is not a movement conservative that Beck and Stein take alarm.