What. An. Idiot.

Complete with tears. Glenn Beck pines for simpler times by invoking the classic Coke commercial with Mean Joe Greene. Uh, did his research staff not get that the commercial was produced in 1979, during the administration of Jimmy Carter?

He also talks about making the "hard choices" and realizing that, though we may not have liked it at the time when we got grounded for partying too hard and too late into the night, "Dad was right." He wishes we could turn back the clock, but, alas (sniff), we can't.

Now, my dad was and is right about a lot of things (just ask him), but just who in Beck's metaphorical weep-fest is "Dad" supposed to be? The Republican Party, who ran up record deficits, lied us into two wars, spied on us illegally, and declared our whole country a battlefield so they could arrest any one of us and whisk us off to some torture prison because they were suspicious of our actions/phone calls/book collections? Or is it media figures like himself and/or Rush Limbaugh, who really invoke a simpler time when whites hated blacks and didn't have to hide it?

Or maybe, in my fondest wishes, it's simply us, who hear our inner voices, our instincts, our guts, tell us that we're off course, taking on water, and it's time to make some hard choices to right our listing ship of a country. This means realizing that we've allowed some companies to get too big to fail without dragging down a global economy, and that we have to print up some money and borrow from a lot of governments to bail out those companies. This also means that we take a hard look at the biggest parts of our economy and try to figure out ways to streamline it, modernize it, make it fair for all Americans, make it cheaper, even if it means that those who derived the most financial benefit from the existing system will have greatly reduced benefits in the future in order to serve the greatest number in the best way. This means clawing our way out our self-inflicted moral quicksand and asserting that we will no longer torture any prisoner or enemy combatant, because we realize that the fruits of those actions are suspect at best and completely useless at worst. This means following the rule of law, revering the US Constitution and all ratified international treaties which are also the law of our land, enforcing the Wall of Separation between church and state, and even defending the right of every idiot with a pen, a computer, a microphone, or a TV camera to say just about anything he/she wants.

Thankfully, I believe that our inner selves correctly chose the right person to lead us in these hard choices. Now, in the words of that leader, "Grab a Mop."