Over the past year and half, I’ve always had at least one colleague who has liked Glenn Beck. First there was Jack Hunter and Dylan Hales (though the later had reservations). More recently Richard Hoste has taken up the charge.

Beck is certainly more unsettled in his opinions than Hannity, Limbaugh & Co, which means that he’s more willing to put on his show people with an “alternative” right-wing perspective, whether it be strict Constitutionalists or Austrian-inflected economists.

In my sporadic viewings of The Glenn Beck Program, I often get the impression that the host is, in a sense, going to school with each new show, likely in an attempt to make up for decades spent boozing. The Founding Fathers, Woodrow Wilson, Fascism, Objectivism and Ayn Rand -- all subjects Beck approaches with a bright-eyed innocence and ignorance. I find programs on, say, American imperialism more interested than updates on the run-away bride, to be sure, but I’d prefer hearing this subject discussed by someone who hadn’t just discovered it existed shortly before going on air at 5 PM.

Beck’s “curiosity” aside, whenever he has been faced with a serious moment of decision, he has invariably come down on the side of the conservative-GOP establishment, and the Washington Power Elite more generally. Beck supported the Wall Street bailouts as not only “necessary” but “not nearly enough”; he was a terror warrior indistinguishable from Hannity throughout the Bush years; and after being invited to the Whitehouse, he discussed how Dubya felt the pain of dead soldiers. Beck found “libertarian” and “antiwar conservative” religion conveniently after the inauguration of a Democratic president.