But I think her question deserves an answer.

It was, of course, William Bennett, writing over the weekend at NRO, who first spoke up loudly and incisively in reaction to Beck’s performance at CPAC. He focused on one of Beck’s customary themes:

To say the GOP and the Democrats are no different, to say the GOP needs to hit a recovery-program-type bottom and hang its head in remorse, is to delay our own country’s recovery from the problems the Democratic left is inflicting. The stakes are too important to go through that kind of exercise, which will ultimately go nowhere anyway…

Jonah Goldberg replied at NRO along somewhat the same lines as J.E., stressing that, if Beck may have overdone things, it was to motivate the troops and scare the wayward straight. Soon, however, Peter Wehner was joining his colleague Jennifer Rubin to second Bennett, and in addition was raising the ante: “If Glenn Beck were the future of conservatism,” he wrote, “it would become a discredited movement.”

Wehner went on to disclaim much concern about either part of that proposition, but, by the beginning of the week, both Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin were each worried enough to devote significant attention both on- and off-air to Beck and his arguments. Levin’s Facebook entry was particularly cutting, concluding with this stark assessment of Beck’s “third way” politics: “These are perilous times and this kind of approach will keep the statists in power for decades.” Some have suggested that Levin’s dislike for Beck is personal, or based on professional jealousy, and similar attacks have been made on his other critics, but these are serious and substantive arguments, and they go well beyond mere annoyance.

So the answer to the amplified question might be this: The point of expressing dismay with Glenn Beck is to get him to re-think his approach, or, failing that, to separate conservatism, at a crucial political moment, from his excesses.

You can be a fan of Glenn Beck’s – you might even be Glenn Beck himself – and acknowledge that his rhetoric is sometimes irresponsible. You can be thankful to Glenn Beck for his contributions to American conservatism – for helping to keep the political flame alive, even build it, during a bleakly dark time – and yet still wonder whether, going forward, his pet themes, favorite arguments, and customary stances aren’t counterproductive and divisive, where not embarrassing. In short, you can agree with everything J.E. wrote, yet still be concerned about the way that Glenn Beck habitually brings vindictive hatred and a self-destructive and dangerous extremism into conservative discourse.

As someone who at least halfway listens to Beck’s TV show almost every weekday, I well recognize that he and his fans are more used to getting this kind of thing from the likes of Arianna Huffington or Media Matters robots than from conservative bloggers. But please check the transcript of his CPAC speech (or cue the video to 5:20): Nearly the first words out of his mouth were “I have to tell you, I hate Woodrow Wilson with everything in me…” (emphasis added). Defenders of Beck’s will be quick to point out that the words were obviously offered in self-consciously exaggerated good humor, as you will see if you view the video, and note the smile on Beck’s face. Furthermore, he was jokingly responding to a specific statement from David Keene’s introduction, in which, while congratulating Beck for conducting a national political seminar, Keene referred to having written an article in college naming Wilson, along with Hitler and Lenin, as one of “the three most dangerous people of the 20th Century.”

Now, jesting about one’s hatred for a relatively remote historical figure, even a duly elected president, wouldn’t amount to much on its own – who cares how anyone feels about Millard Fillmore? – but any Beck viewer or listener knows that, hard as it may be for the uninitiated to believe, Beck is joking on the square here. Indeed, he has seemed obsessed with exposing a purported clear and very present danger of progressivism, which he identifies both with historical figures like Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Margaret Sanger, and with modern day progressives like the Republican 2008 presidential candidate or our current Secretary of State. (If you happened to watch Beck’s hour-long New York harborscape interview with Sarah Palin, then you might recall her reluctance to respond to his anti-progressive spiel, especially when applied to her former running mate. Beck later described her demeanor as remarkably “guarded” – as against criticism from her legion of detractors. My personal opinion is that, though she likes Beck and wishes to appeal to his fans, her political antennae, and perhaps her common sense and personal decency, were functioning efficiently.)

When Beck inveighs hatefully against Woodrow Wilson, he’s also inveighing against John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and many millions of other people, in both parties, and I would question the honesty of any regular Beck viewer who denied the evident fierceness of Beck’s feelings on this subject. If you think I’m exaggerating, then how do you explain away statements like the following, also from the CPAC keynote?

Progressivism is the cancer in America and it is eating our Constitution. And it was designed to eat the Constitution. To progress past the Constitution.

…and, again on cancer, while reacting to a statement of Theodore Roosevelt’s on income inequality:

[T]his is not our founders’ idea of America. And this is the cancer that’s eating at America.

(applause)

It is big government – it’s a socialist utopia. And we need to address it as if it is a cancer. It must be cut out of the system because they cannot co-exist. And you don’t cure cancer by – well, I’m just going to give you a little bit of cancer. You must eradicate it. It cannot co-exist. And we need big thinkers, and brave people with spines who can make the case – that can actually say to Americans: look it’s going to be hard – it’s going to be hard but it’s going to be okay. We’re going to make it.

This kind of language is not just exaggerated (and cliché): It’s pure demagogy, and it’s dehumanizing. Beck’s delivery and self-deprecation take the edge off… and I’ll now refrain from making the kind of historical reference that I tend to doubt Beck himself, in my place, would resist – much. I’ll just ask you to imagine the above with a few exclamation points, hand gestures, and a throbbing throng of the newly educated – live and in person, not across a warm TV screen.

Even before we look at progressivism and decide which features we can and should do without, and which not, at least anytime soon, short of Apocalypse or Harmonic Convergence; before we consider realistic prospects and priorities; before we look up Burke or Kirk or Goldwater or Reagan or whichever gospels in search of first principles; before we even know whether we’re attacking 100 years of policy or 100 years of thinking, or perhaps, in fact, an outlook exactly as old as human civilization and integral to it; before we ask ourselves whether the Founders, or Lincoln, or the Greatest Generation, or Reagan, weren’t in critical regards the progressive revolutionaries or evolutionaries of their day; before we ask whether Glenn Beck himself isn’t advocating a totalized utopian crusade against a social ill he calls progressivism; before we ask whether the absolute eradication and uncompromising, social-political surgical extirpation of a creed or ideology can ever be an American, a democratic and republican, project – we can say one thing with certainty about a perspective that defines the enemies among our fellow citizens and the terms of the struggle as Beck’s (often) does:

It’s not conservative.

Beinart takes a long look in the column at the Obama campaign, which around that time was finishing Hillary Clinton off, then moves to the argument that became familiar to all close observers of the presidential race:

It is this remarkable hybrid campaign, far more than Obama’s thin legislative résumé, that should reassure voters that he can run the government.

Beinart proceeds without transition to a sentence that, with Obamamania a distant memory, today reads as a non sequitur:

As president, he’ll need to keep his supporters mobilized: It will take a grass-roots movement, breathing down Congress’s neck, to pass universal health care.

If Beinart ever believed this sentence, then he should have been among the first people to declare ObamaCare dead.  In part because the President himself never pursued the kind of strategy likely to engage the leftwing grass-roots, but more because a fad and a fervor are not the same thing as a political movement, and just as much because the political terrain had rather radically shifted between April 2008 and January 2009, there was no prospect of sustained neck-downbreathing  of the sort Beinart was imagining – except, as we have seen, coming from people a lot more agitated about the economy and fiscal madness.

But in dealing with those very supporters, he’ll also have to be ruthless so as not to get caught up in the kind of side skirmishes, such as gays in the military…

…or maybe detainee treatment and interrogation?

…that weakened Bill Clinton early on. Obama’s experience whipping up support on MySpace while simultaneously tamping it down is exactly the kind he’ll need in the Oval Office.

Uh… yeah.  Persuading overenthusiastic sympathizers to shut down a web page… truly a profile in courage, vision, and executive decision-making that George Washington himself could have learned from.

Approaching the finale:

…if Obama can come across as idealistic without being moralistic, if he can keep his supporters’ spirits high and their expectations in check, if he can fuse exuberance and discipline, he might just run the government pretty well.

Instead, Obama has come across as cynical and hypocritical, built up his supporters’ expectations while leaving the hard work to everyone else and agitating the opposition, fused overexposure and underperformance, and set all-time records for loss of popularity in a first year, leaving his party in disarray.

That won’t be easy, but then, neither is running for president. Just ask Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

Looks like figuring out the difference between running a campaign and leading a nation may not be very easy either… if you’re mesmerized by your own wishful thinking.  Just ask Peter Beinart.

I encourage you to join me in demanding the full story behind why the filth who orchestrated [the murders of captured American soldiers] are walking around free. We won’t get those answers unless we push for them, with the same courage and dedication our fallen heroes gave to their duty. This story will go away, unless you keep it alive. Love the warriors, by making it clear to Washington that their lives are worth more than any politician’s career.

Hayward devotes much more attention to capsule biographies of the American soldiers executed by Qazali’s forces and apparently on Qazali’s orders, than to the Qazali release itself (actually the second release of a Qazali brother to Iraqi authorities ahead of probable full freedom), and much of the rest of the post is taken up by free-form indictments of Obama security policy from an admittedly “hostile” perspective.   The responses from HotAirite commenters are unsurprising:  re-echoing rage, plaudits for the good Doctor… and a trollish attempt to change the subject to Ronald Reagan and Iran-Contra.

For wider political resonance, Hayward brings in Janet Napolitano’s performance as Homeland Security Secretary in relation to the foiled Christmas Day Flight 253 bombing, as well as the simmering issue of Navy SEALs charged with abusing an Iraqi captive.  Other conservatives have followed a similar pattern of attempting to connect Qazali to issues that are only indirectly related, at best:  Andy McCarthy also hits the Christmas Day attack, and expresses “astonish[ment]” that he’d be observing a capitulation to Iranian-backed terrorists even while “Iranian tyrants are brutally suppressing a revolt by the Iranian people.”  In a post entitled “No Conceivable Justification for This One,” Jennifer Rubin asks for Democrats to join Republicans “call[ing] foul on the entire Obama approach to terror.”  Allahpundit refers to the apparent exchange as “unreal” and “mind-bendingly insane”:  Linking to an item on former Gitmo detainees who may have been part of a Flight 253 conspiracy, he asks, “How many jihadis do we have to release before someone figures out that releasing jihadis is an exceedingly bad idea?”

We don’t have to accept every notional connection to the Qazali affair to admit it raises serious questions, and to agree with Senators Kyl and Sessions, who have formally requested answers from the Administration on important policy questions.  Concerned citizens have a right to demand a full accounting.  Still, if we decide to reject the explanations – those already available and any further ones to come – we should be clear what else we’re rejecting, and what else we’re asking for.

The pundits and bloggers have been primarily responding to reports from Bill Roggio at the Weekly Standard and the Long War Journal in which anonymous U.S. intelligence officers are quoted denying that the release was anything other than an unequal “swap,” and ominously warning of Qazali’s eventual return to violence and subversion:  “We are going to pay for this in the future,” says one individual identified simply as “a military officer.”  Roggio deserves credit for breaking this story – as well as for his long service to all of us in reporting on the Conflict Formerly Known as the War on Terror – but you have to turn to official U.S. military statements, or perhaps the typically even-handed summary by ABC’s Jake Tapper, to get much understanding of why anyone would even consider letting this particular detainee go along with some 100 of his comrades.

According to Tapper, a spokesman for US Forces Iraq (formerly Multinational Forces Iraq) has denied a quid pro quo, and asserts that the release was performed under the terms of the US-Iraqi Security Agreement, in recognition of the Iraqi government’s sovereign rights and responsibilities.  At Contentions, Max Boot provides useful details and context, responding directly to conservative bloggers (including his colleague Rubin) while also pointing to the larger implications of their “understandably irate” reactions.  After explaining the relationship of Qazali’s group to the larger and better known Shia militia under Moqtada al-Sadr, he compares the Shia fighters to the Anbar Sunnis whom the US military and Iraqi government have brought into a complex reconciliation process – inevitably involving the forgiveness of past violence, including terror and other war crimes.

More critically for our purposes here, Boot reminds us that a policy of laying every ill in the world at the feet of President Barack Obama, and reflexively grouping each new incident with every other criticism, has its limits – and dangers:

All of these deals have been brokered by Prime Minister Maliki with the close oversight of General Ray Odierno, now the U.S. Forces-Iraq commander, and his boss, General Petraeus. They can hardly be accused of being “soft” on terrorism, yet they know that in the end warfare alone will not suffice to end an insurgency. There must be a process of political reconciliation, which involves accommodating even vile figures such as the Qazali brothers, who have American blood on their hands. It is the same realization reached by Lincoln, Churchill, and other great wartime commanders who understood that after the guns fell silent they would have to learn to live with former enemies.

If we insist on the political equivalent of a “terminate with extreme prejudice” order, we should be aware that the Commander-in-Chief may happen to be well away from the target zone on this one.

As we pass the first zero-U.S. casualty month since Operation Iraqi Freedom began, with our forces on track for effectively complete withdrawal in 2011, there may be little interest in, and less practical basis for, an assertion of American prerogatives on what amounts to Iraqi policy toward former insurgents.  Assuming that Boot’s description is more right than wrong, and assuming further that we’re not demanding a complete reversal of current U.S. policy in Iraq, entailing the recall of Odierno and Petraeus and the commencement of military operations against Iran from the territory of our newly declared protectorate Iraq, what are the critics demanding we do differently in such cases?  Summary executions justified as acts of revenge?  Forcible transfer to indefinite or permanent American custody?

Rightly or wrongly, we have accepted that “what happened in Iraq, stays in Iraq,” and we long ago, indeed from the very beginning, disclaimed any intention to take Iraq over.  On the day we changed this policy, or declared all-out war on Islamism (the two would likely go together sooner or later), there would be plenty more where the Qazalis came from, and there would soon be many more fallen heroes to avenge – in perpetuity or ’til kingdom come.