Maybe The Scummiest Glenn Beck Show Ever: Smears Obama's Parents, Says Mom 'Abandoned' Him For 'Marxist Political Theory'

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

OK, I know it's hard to imagine Glenn Beck getting much worse than his history-abusing eliminationist attacks on the progressive movement, or his constant smearing of anyone who works for President Obama as a likely Marxist.

But yesterday, he managed -- by unleashing an all-out attack on President Obama's family, and particularly his mother. It doesn't get much lower than that.

Of course, he opened the attack on Obama's family by saying that he was not attacking them. Really.

And then he proceeded immediately to smear them:

I want you to know that I am by no means attacking his family. And in fact, I think after the first five minutes of the show tonight, you're actually going to feel sorry for the little boy, Barry Obama -- the boy, the little one. This little boy. He's so cute! I don't feel sorry for the man, but the tragedy of this kid's childhood is staggering!

Lessee ... you're not attacking his family, but then turn around and immediately claim that they abandoned the poor little kid. Come again?

His parents, seemingly, from what you can piece together, his parents seemingly placed radical politics over everything else, including their little boy!

I am not one to talk. I grew up with a Dad who worked all the time. He was a small business owner, he owned the city bakery in Mount Vernon, Washington. And, um the only time I saw him was at work. I work all the time. My kids come to work, and we spend time at my job, or we travel together. A lot of us do this. We have long hours and we support our families.

But how many of us have been abandoned for the bakery? Or my job? Or your job? Would you ever leave your kid for that?

How about -- how many of us have been abandoned for a Marxist political theory? Or politics? This didn't happen to little Barack Obama once but twice. Both parents!

Of course, Obama's father did indeed essentially abandon his family -- but it wasn't for politics, it was for personal ambition: he wanted to attend Harvard without the encumbrances of a wife and tiny son. The senior Obama was not a particularly admirable guy.

But then Beck turns to the subject of Obama's late mother, who Obama himself described as "the one who was the single constant in my life," and "that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her."

How does Beck describe her? Why, as a commie sympathizer, of course:

She was described by a friend as, quote, "a fellow traveler." If anybody who reads about progressives and Marxism, you recognize that language.

Yes indeed we do. "Fellow traveler" is what the McCarthyite Red-baiters of the 1950s liked to call liberals. Of course, the proof for Beck is that Dunham actually supported Adlai Stevenson in the 1956 election. Impressive, no?

Dunham later left to Hawaii, to travel to Indonesia for a second time, and then she left her son to move to Pakistan. She left her son with her parents. This is the second time this poor little boy was left by a parent!

This is complete and utter rubbish. Stanley Ann Dunham did not at any time "abandon" her son, and Beck's claim that she did is a filthy smear of the lowest sort.

From Wikipedia:

It was at the East-West Center that Dunham met Lolo Soetoro, a student from Indonesia. They married in 1966 or 1967 and moved with six-year-old Barack to Jakarta, Indonesia, just after the unrest surrounding the ascent of Suharto. ... In Indonesia, Dunham enriched her son's education with correspondence courses in English, recordings of Mahalia Jackson, and speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. She sent the young Obama back to Hawaii to attend Punahou School rather than having him stay in Asia with her.

Madelyn Dunham's job as a vice-president at the Bank of Hawaii helped pay the steep tuition, with some assistance from a scholarship. ... Ann Dunham left Soetoro in 1972, returning to Hawaii and reuniting with her son Barack for several years.

... Dunham returned to graduate school in Honolulu in 1974, while raising Barack and Maya. When Dunham returned to Indonesia for field work in 1975 with Maya, after three years in Honolulu, Barack chose not to go, preferring to finish high school in Hawaii while living with his grandparents.

So, to quickly recap: Ann Dunham never "abandoned" Barack Obama. She did send him to a private school for the sake of giving him an elite education -- which is hardly the same as abandonment. And when she returned to Indonesia to conduct field work as an anthropologist, the teenaged Obama chose to stay in Hawaii with his grandparents instead -- again, nothing particularly unusual about that.

And for what it's worth, Dunham didn't go to work in Pakistan until the late 1980s, by which time she was conducting work for the Asia Development Bank (which suggests, coincidentally, that Dunham was not exactly an opponent of capitalism). And "little Barry" by that time was a full-grown man in his 20s.

There's a lot more wrong with Beck's attack on Obama's family, particularly his smearing of Obama's grandparents as likely Marxists because they attended a Unitarian Church.

But if nothing else, it proves something we've already come to know: There is no depth to which Glenn Beck will not sink.

And at this point, he's just wallowing in scum.