If you sensed something of a quiet spell about ten days ago, a lull in the usual media storm, it may have been owing to the fact that Glenn Beck, the energetically hateful, truth-twisting radio and Fox News Channel talk-show host, was absent from the airwaves for a week, to have his appendix removed. A few days after his surgery, he made it clear, via his Twitter feed, that he hated just watching TV, which is, of course, the terrible fate of those of us who don’t have talk shows. (“I know how U feel. Watching the news & knowing wht I say 2 my tv makes no difference,” he wrote. “I cnt wait 2 giv U wht I think has bn going on.”) By the middle of last week, he was back, breathing fire about Obama’s response to the Fort Hood shootings.

The persona that Beck has cobbled together over the past few years combines a determination to draw attention to himself, because what he has to say is so important, with an outsized, in-your-face show of modesty—he likes to refer to himself as a fatty (he’s barely overweight) and a clown, and, like many an egomaniac throughout history, he takes pains to present himself as a regular guy, shrugging his shoulders and saying, “But what do I know?” He declares himself no special friend to either Democrats or Republicans, and claims to be a libertarian, but his agenda is to throw tacks in front of the wheels of progress and, specifically, to make the Obama Administration crash and burn. Beck looks cherubic, with his boyish crewcut, his rubbery, expressive face, his wide eyes, and his seemingly innocent smile, but he has a wizened heart and a sulfurous outlook on American life and politics.

Some see him as a joke, and some see him as a danger, and some—especially those who like guns, don’t want health-care reform, and feel that their freedom is somehow threatened by every political initiative of the Obama Administration—are grateful to him, for his efforts to “take back America.” In March, Beck started the 9.12 Project—a forum for frustrated folks, meant to “bring us all back to the place we were on September 12, 2001.” On that day, the Project’s online mission statement says, “we were not obsessed with Red States, Blue States or political parties. We were united as Americans, standing together to protect the greatest nation ever created.” It’s true—we were. But nothing about Beck’s 9.12 Project has even a tinge of that post-9/11 spirit of generosity. One of the “principles” of the organization is “I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable.” Beck invariably uses his real or feigned bromance with the Founding Fathers to explain his crabbed selfishness; he justifies this “principle” with a quote from George Washington, which actually has an entirely different spirit: “It is not everyone who asketh that deserveth charity; all however, are worth of the inquiry or the deserving may suffer.”

Beck’s negative, regressive take on politics is expressed with raw-throated outrage, smiley sarcasm, and, occasionally, a display of hurt, even tears. He’s very effective at putting himself over, but it’s unclear why he has been so effective at rallying people—and also unclear, for all his bluster, what it is, exactly, that he wants them to do, beyond keep on watching and listening to him and buying his books. He is Mr. Synergy: to give one example, his book “The Christmas Sweater,” based on his personal journey of redemption, comes in two versions, one for adults and one for children, and he performed the story around the country as a stage show. The performance was filmed and will play in movie theatres this holiday season. In a video advertising the movie on his Web site, he says that he got so many letters from people saying that the tale had changed their lives that he started yet another Web site, called Face Your Storm, on which they could tell their own stories. In a tweet last week, after saying that Republicans and Democrats have a reason to fear 2010—the kind of rumbling, ominous, yet unspecific warning that is typical of Beck—he wrote, “Tell yr friends & C U a week from Sat in The Villages, FL. FREE RALLY.” (The Villages is an enormous retirement community in central Florida, almost entirely white, and with such a high percentage of lever pullers that campaigning politicians make a point of going there.) The rally is also, not surprisingly, a book signing for Beck. There have been 9.12 demonstrations all over the country this year, and tens of thousands of people showed up to demonstrate in Washington on September 12th—an unofficial count put the number at between fifty and seventy thousand people. (That’s impressive, though not as impressive as the absurdly overinflated figure of 1.7 million, which Beck cited on the morning show “Fox & Friends.”)

Beck moved to Fox News from CNN Headline News at the beginning of 2009, and his ratings, which were good to begin with, have gone up significantly since midsummer, when, from his bottomless grab bag of fearmongering and inciteful comments about the coming “redistribution of wealth,” and the revolutionaries who want to take away our freedom, and the apparently satanic form of capitalism called eco-capitalism, and Mao-loving politicians, he pulled out a doozy. It was a couple of days before the “beer summit” at the White House—the sitdown that Obama arranged for Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and the policeman who had arrested him outside his house a few weeks earlier. Beck said, on “Fox & Friends,” “This President, I think, has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people, or the white culture, I don’t know what it is.” It’s not a logical impossibility for anyone, even for a person who is half black and half white, to make a racist statement, but Beck’s act of malice was, to say the least, stupid—and, it could be argued, not without its own whiff of racism. Although a number of advertisers subsequently boycotted the show, Beck did not retreat, and the media emperor Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox News, supported him, saying in a recent interview that Obama “did make a very racist comment, uh, about, you know, blacks and whites and so on.” (In the same interview, Murdoch defended Fox News’s prideful characterization of itself as “fair and balanced.”)

Throughout the year, Beck has gone after Administration officials, repeatedly showing irresponsibly edited video clips, in which they say things that make them easy marks. Sometimes, though, the clips really do raise questions about someone’s judgment or self-awareness, even when you hear a longer version of the comments. Take Anita Dunn, the former White House director of communications. (She was filling the post this year on an interim basis and left last week.) Dunn gave a speech at a Maryland high school—Beck played a snippet so often that you could repeat it by heart—in which she clumsily used a quotation from Mao as a positive life lesson, and it’s no wonder Beck latched on to it. Van Jones, who was brought in by Obama to spearhead the creation of green jobs, was undone, in part, by Beck’s ceaseless screenings of his video past, and resigned in September. (The Administration should have known that some of Jones’s speeches, and other questionable parts of his record, would be made public; the Internet-savvyness of the Obama Presidential campaign seemed to vanish not long after the election.)

A headline at the top of Beck’s Web site announces what he thinks he’s selling: “the fusion of entertainment and enlightenment.” If by this Beck means that his product is radioactive, he’s got that right. We can only hope that its toxic charge will fade over time. But that seems unlikely. At the end of the Elia Kazan–Budd Schulberg movie “A Face in the Crowd,” the Arkansas opportunist and petty criminal who has been repackaged, by a radio broadcaster, as a guitar-playing professional hayseed called Lonesome Rhodes (played brilliantly by Andy Griffith), and who has been consumed and ruined by fame, shows his true colors when he bad-mouths his audience over an open mike. The nation abandons him, and, as the movie ends, he’s shouting, unheard, into the night. These days, because of the Internet, it’s not so easy to get rid of a demagogue. Long after Beck leaves radio and TV, his sound bites will still be with us. ♦