Why "benighted?"

Merriam Webster: be·night·ed
Function: adjective
Date: 15th century
1 : overtaken by darkness or night
2 : existing in a state of intellectual, moral, or social darkness : unenlightened

To Glenn Beck fans who hate Obama and hope he fails ... Good News! He will fail. He is failing. More on this below. So you can rejoice.

But Obama won't fail for the reasons very confused Beck, very confused, says.

Confused on socialism & fascism

Beck says that Obama's a socialist who promotes equality of outcomes by redistributing wealth -- or, contradicting himself in practically the same breath -- that he's a fascist, destroying America through statism*. Beck has proclaimed that Obama promotes "communism on steroids."

* "Statism": repudiates individualism and exalts the nation as an organic body headed by the Supreme Leader and nurtured by unity, force, and discipline.

Beck said in an interview with Orrin Hatch (R) on 11/4/08: "Senator, I don't know what has happened to our country. I mean, we are swinging so far to the left." But the truth is that both Democrats are well to the right of true center and Republicans are far to the right.

Most U.S. politicians are well to the right of center.

Beck made clear in the interview that he's a true Republican partisan for McCain: "I hold out hope as well for that (that McCain be elected)."

Beck often promotes the book, Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg. Goldberg maintains liberals and progressives are fascists, even though he admits that "... obviously, none of the current crop of self-described progressives are eager to replay the darkest chapters of the past."

Goldberg states:

The principled conservative position is that the free market should rule the day. Businesses are never "too big to fail" and corporate welfare is folly. In all honesty, we must admit that many Republicans fail to live up to these conservative principles. But what are liberal principles? They are simply this: corporations should be "progressive." Government should regulate corporations heavily as a means of using big business as another branch of the state. Hillary Clinton wants "public-private partnerships."

First: "Conservatives" do indeed believe the "free market" should rule. They often speak of natural law, but ignore natural laws that cause "market forces" to fail in their version of the "free market" ... I describe them at Invisible Hand Drops Ball & Economics 101.

Second: His explanation of "liberal principles" is totally false. Government should regulate corporations, not "as a means of using big business as another branch of the state", but as a way to make market forces operational as described at the link just above. The idea of "public-private partnerships" is a tribute to corporate power; the purpose of such partnerships is actually to avoid using government where it should be used ... including corporations in areas (like health insurance) where government ("we the people") must exert control to avoid market and system failures. When systems fail, many individuals fail.

Goldberg's and Beck's "principled conservatives" live in a black-and-white world where it's either "free market liberty" or "government tyranny" under democracy. The reality is, however, that the world is not either-or, black-and-white -- would it were that simple -- it's an either-or world. Both pure socialism and pure capitalism ignore this fact of life.

Conservatives distort liberal principles; they don't believe in democracy or the principles outlined in the U.S. Constitution. Never did. Never will.

And don't you know? Hitler was a socialist. Yes, that's right. After all, he was party the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party. Concentrate on the name and never mind who he attacked, persecuted, and executed:

Wikipedia on Hitler: Hitler's beer hall oratory, attacking Jews, social democrats, liberals, reactionary monarchists, capitalists and communists, began attracting adherents.

Who did he persecute? German communists, socialists and trade unionists were among the earliest domestic opponents of Nazism and were also among the first to be sent to concentration camps. ... Whenever the Nazis occupied a new territory, members of communist, socialist, or anarchist groups were normally to be the first persons detained or executed.

So Hitler part was "socialist" and yet killed socialists? Hitler headed a "workers" party, yet sent them to concentration camps? One can name a political party anything, but the name does not necessarily convey its policies.

From The Political Compass on Hitler and the Nazis:

... within certain US circles,the misconception remains that fascism is essentially left wing, and that the Nazis were socialists simply because of the "socialism" in their name. We wonder if respondents who insist on uncritically accepting the Nazis' cynical self-definition would be quite as eager to believe that the German Democratic Republic [East Germany] was democratic.

Another example: Does this sound "liberal" or "conservative"?

In a September 1934 speech to the National Socialist Women's Organization, Adolf Hitler argued that for the German woman her "world is her husband, her family, her children, and her home."

Beck even maintained that the shooting at the holocaust museum was Obama's fault. He maintains that Obama's "socialistic" policies are leading people of dubious sanity to become unglued. Therefore the outbreak of right-wing violence is Obama's fault.

OK enough on this Beck nonsense that Obama is a socialist AND a fascist.

Confused in thinking Obama is a far left president

The economy

What about the economy and the devastation Obama is wreaking? And all that massive debt? Yes, he's creating some of it as stimulus to revive the economy. Does stimulus make sense?

Yes, because of the equation for GDP, which math-challenged "conservatives" don't seem to understand.