On today's program Beck was generous enough to provide another example of his compulsive dishonesty. And it was packaged in a familiar form for Beck: the old out-of-context video clip gambit. On this occasion Beck presented this segment of President Obama discussing health care:

Obama: [W]e said from the start that it was going to be important for us to be consistent in saying to people if you can have your -- if you want to keep the health insurance you got, you can keep it, that you're not going to have anybody getting in between you and your doctor in your decision making. And I think that some of the provisions that got snuck in might have violated that pledge.

After playing the clip, Beck went into outrage overdrive, complaining first about the sentence fragment "...consistent in saying to people..." implying that Obama was only "saying" these things and that he didn't mean them. Only an idiot would interpret these extemporaneous remarks in context that way. And that, of course, is Beck's built-in excuse.

But the larger corruption of the truth was Beck's reaction to the news that some provisions were "snuck" into the bill that violated the pledge that no one would get between you and your doctor. Beck was aghast that the President would tolerate such legislative misbehavior. He castigated the President for not immediately putting a halt to Congress's covert attempt to countermand his promise and tarnish his honor. Beck went on to declare that if the President had spoken up about this, that he (Beck) would heartily approve:

Beck: Well let me tell you something. Not only would that be the right thing for any president to do, his approval ratings would go through the roof. People would actually say "Well OK now, wait a minute. If he's gonna do that I might actually listen to him."

Apparently Beck wasn't listening because Obama did precisely what Beck was accusing him of not doing. Obama expressly stated that he had caught the errant provisions and set about eliminating them. And this information was in the very segment that Beck had just played on the air. Except that Beck cut out the parts where Obama talked about scrubbing the problem provisions. Here's the quote again in full. Note that the bold section in the middle is the only part that Beck played:

Obama: If you look at the package that we've presented -- and there's some stray cats and dogs that got in there that we were eliminating, we were in the process of eliminating. For example... ...we said from the start that it was going to be important for us to be consistent in saying to people if you can have your -- if you want to keep the health insurance you got, you can keep it, that you're not going to have anybody getting in between you and your doctor in your decision making. And I think that some of the provisions that got snuck in might have violated that pledge. And so we are in the process of scrubbing them and making sure that it's tight.

The complete clip shows unequivocally that Obama is keeping his pledge regarding the doctor/patient relationship. But Beck's audience won't know that because Beck unscrupulously edited it out. Then he portrayed the President as negligent for not doing something that in reality he did. And he even went so far as to admit that the American people would reward the President for doing the things that Beck left on the cutting room floor. And, of course, that's reason Beck did it.

Beck certainly knew the content of the whole speech. So it is inescapable that he deliberately misrepresented it to advance his deceit. He purposefully truncated it to prevent his audience from seeing anything about Obama that they might regard as positive. And in the process he hammered Obama for not doing what he actually did do.

It's too bad that most of Beck's disciples will never hear about this fraud. Although many are so thoroughly bewitched that they might not even grasp it if they did hear about it. But it is important to continue to document it. Open minded people who haven't formed opinions about Beck need to have this kind of information to keep from being duped by him.