It may take 27 years to undo the damage Beck caused in 27 months

Will Bunch on the start of Miss Becky's slide to oblivion:

But I think that progressives might want to hold off on that victory lap -- unless it's to get in better shape for the long battle ahead.

Because the truth is that Beck's ouster isn't really the end of the nightmare, but just the beginning of the end. Over the last 27 months, Beck -- and let's be clear that he had a lot of help from the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin and Sean Hannity and Rand Paul and all the folks in the Tea Party Movement -- managed to do incalculable harm to the American body politic, that Beck was exactly like Tom and Daisy Buchanan in "The Great Gatsby" who "smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness.."

You'll probably hear a lot about how Beck coarsened the political debate and how his words may have incited violence, but I think the wreckage is a lot more substantive, to actual policies that affect Americans every day. You see, there was a reason that Beck was so fond of a political theory called the Overton Window-- so enamored, in fact, that he made it the title of his (officially) fictional "thriller" novel last summer. The Overton Window is a notion that you can radically move the parameters of political debate by pushing talk to the outer limits, so that ideas that were once deemed as extreme suddenly appeared to be normal.

You could go on and on -- the talk-radio jihad against big government that has put gutless Democrats so on the defensive that they no longer fight to protect vital programs but only over whether to agree to "steep" spending cuts or "draconian" ones, or the fear-mongering on terrorism and Gitmo that made quivering congressmen afraid to house terror suspects in our maximum security prisons. Don't think that Beck's nightly burst of insanity didn't have a lot to do with these things, because they did.

Don't believe me? Then ask a fellow in South Carolina named Bob Inglis who was a Republican congressman until he told his constituents to "turn off Glenn Beck," and lost a primary to an upstart who got 71 percent of the vote. Why do you think the Republicans in Washington remain in lock step, even as 90 percent of what they stay in lock step for is bat-guano crazy.

The solutions to these problems are out there, but they are stymied by a two-year explosion of madness, the right-wing backlash, which I reported on my book that is called "The Backlash," and it was Glenn Beck that lit the fuse. Yes, his reign on the Fox News Channel may last little more than 27 months. But it may take the rest of us 27 years -- or more -- to undo all of the damage.

The motto of the Bush and Beck and Teabagger years as the short strokes of three decades of the Reagan Delusion is, "Act in haste, repent at leisure".

There was nothing hasty about the Repug conspiracy of course. It was well thought out since about Nixon's day, but its fruition occurred during the eight years under their trained chimp. If they'da got one who could throw feces correctly we'd be in even more trouble than we are.

Given that our wrongest and most obtuse and loudest Dead Enders are so slow to learn and can't recognise truth or even reality when it hits 'em in the face like a dead carp, I think Bunch is wildly optimistic that the cumulative damage these wingnut bastards like Beck and Bush have done will be anywhere near corrected in only 27 years.