Last Friday, while the cable news world watched Rick Sanchez’s career end in a spectacular crash via an undisciplined and unhinged radio interview, Glenn Beck was blaming the evils of slavery on government regulation, then asked if, via increased insurance rates, “are we creating slaves?” Only in the tortured and hyperbolic world of opinion media can one be expected to hear this sort of analysis.

Mr. Beck was criticizing President Obama‘s efforts to reform health care, legitimately criticizing increased insurance rates as a by-product of the reform bill passed last spring. But as Mr. Beck got deep into a metaphor of “enslaving people” with health care, somehow things took a dramatic turn toward lunacy. At one point he claimed that slavery “started with seemingly innocent ideas” and then “the government began to regulate things,” then finished by asking if, by reforming health care, “are we creating slaves”?

Beck opened the following segment by stating, “We are enslaving people with our health insurance and driving the cost of our health insurance up.” He then went down a rabbit hole of American slavery, how it started with “seemingly good intentions” then got much worse, ostensibly due to government regulation. Really.

The President is exactly right when he said ‘slaves sitting around the campfire didn’t know when slavery was going to end, but they knew that it would. And it took a long time to end slavery.’ yes it did. But it also took a long time to start slavery. And it started small, and it started with seemingly innocent ideas. And then a little court order here, and a court order there and a little regulation here and a little more regulation there. And before we knew it, America had slavery. It didn’t come over in a ship to begin with, as an evil slave trade. The government began to regulate things because the people needed answers and needed solutions. It started in a court room then it went to the legislatures. That’s how slavery began. And it took a long time to enslave an entire race of people, and convince another race of people that they were somehow or another, less than them. But it can be done. I would ask you to decide, are we freeing slaves? Or are we creating slaves? That’s a question that must be answered.

There have been some who have thought that Beck’s wild successes in the last year might have made him soft in his anti-Obama rhetoric, perhaps evidenced by the relatively politicals-free atmosphere of this 8-28 rally (which he had encouraged). But the following audio clip reminds us that Mr. Beck is still willing to make any metaphor necessary to get his point across, even if some will see it as offensive. H/T Media Matters

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