[YouTube here, via MisterMovies.]

This was too funny to pass up. We've known all along that Glenn Beck is a two-bit phony. Now we see how Glenn Beck gets himself properly weepy for the cameras: A little Vicks Vaporub.

One might dismiss this as merely a one-off for this shoot. But you can hear Beck himself say:

Beck: I think it's getting used to it -- my eyes are getting used to it.

From regular and continuous use, mayhaps?

The whole scene reminds us that Beck practices his schtick over and over before he performs. Which means he's gotten real good at working up those tears and choking up to say, "I love my country -- but I fear for it!"

This may be what Sen. Lindsey Graham had in mind yesterday:

Via Sam Stein:

"Only in America can you make that much money crying," Graham said of Beck. "Glenn Beck is not aligned with any party. He is aligned with cynicism and there has always been a market for cynics. But we became a great nation not because we are a nation of cynics. We became a great nation because we are a nation of believers."

In other Beck news:

-- Media Matters has an excellent followup to the Salon piece about Beck's disciplehood at the feet of W. Cleon Skousen -- which in turn illustrated Beck's long history of promoting extremist beliefs -- pointing out that Skousen was not exactly what you would call ... enlightened on matters of race:

Fox News' Glenn Beck has heavily promoted the writings of far-right activist W. Cleon Skousen, even making Skousen's book, The 5000 Year Leap, a central part of his 9-12 Project. Skousen is the author of several controversial works, including The Making of America: The Substance and Meaning of the Constitution, which presented as "the story of slavery in America" a passage from a book that attacked abolitionists for delaying emancipation; cast slave owners as "the worst victims of the system"; claimed white schoolchildren "were likely to envy the freedom of their colored playmates"; and claimed that "[s]lavery did not make white labor unrespectable, but merely inefficient," because "the slave had a deliberateness of motion which no amount of supervision could quicken."

This continues to remind me of last week's interview with Katie Couric, when he refused to explain what he meant by white culture.

[Via ThinkProgress.]

-- Beck is having a little difficulty dealing with Internet memes. Especially when dealing with charges that, by golly, we haven't been able to disprove yet!

-- Finally, has anyone else noticed that, on the cover of his new book, Beck looks exactly like the illegitimate love child of Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schultz? Just wondering.