'America Is Better Than Glenn Beck'

Bob Herbert and Charles Blow use their New York Times columns today to rip Glenn Beck's DC rally:

• Herbert: "America is better than Glenn Beck," he writes, criticizing the Fox persona as "a provocateur who likes to play with matches in the tinderbox of racial and ethnic confrontation. He seems oblivious to the real danger of his execrable behavior. ... My sincere advice to Beck, Palin and their followers is chill, baby, chill." Full column here.

• Blow: Beck "is the anti-King. ... He "wants to swaddle his movement in the cloth of the civil rights movement, a cloth soaked in the blood and tears of the innocent and oppressed, a cloth his divisiveness and self-aggrandizing threatens to defile. In fact, to even insinuate that the president’s policies are in any way equivalent to the brutality of the Jim Crow South at the time of the civil rights movement is the highest order of insult." Don't get mad, he advises: Use today to watch King's speech again. Full column here.

(More Glenn Beck stories.)