I don’t think there’s a single person in the progressive blogosphere who would disagree with this statement:

“Glenn Beck is a totally whacked out, dangerous loon.”

Beck hasn’t just shifted the Overton window of what’s politically acceptable to splooge over the airwaves - he’s disemboweled the glass from its casement with a #10 crowbar, relocated it to another time zone, and shattered it into a million little silicon slivers with his verbal sledgehammer.

In the past couple of months, there are two issues that have completely transfixed the political left: 1) HCR, and 2) Glenn Beck.

HCR we might be able to still do something about. Beck, never. At this point, with the advertiser boycotts, the continuing documentation of his unhingedness, and our fears that he’s stoking his rabble to true, history changing action (read that however you wish), we’re doing something for him that he could never have done himself:

Legitimizing his nutballishness.

Not to us. That’s never been the point. With our assistance, though, he’s managed to cast himself as a right wing martyr. It makes no difference that his craziness is, well, crazy. We apparently haven’t learned something about the fringe (and I do mean fringe) right - when one of their own is attacked, unlike progressives / liberals who will throw their own under the bus in a NY minute, the whingers circle their gilded wagons around the person being attacked, and fire back.

When some random commenter goes off like a cuckoo clock on a progressive blog, the advice usually goes something like, “Ignore the troll, and it will go away”. Listen, I’ve been online since before Tim Berners Lee developed the http protocol, and ignoring trolls really does (generally) work. If you truly starve an attention-whoring troll of the response it so desperately seeks, online or in real life, it will eventually go away, its quest for your eardrums and eyeballs unsated.

Obviously, the rhetorical war against Glenn Beck is ratcheting up a notch nearly every day. And he’s lovin’ it. And Roger Ailes is loving it - hell, at this point, Ailes and Murdoch don’t care if they have to totally subsidize Beck, and if Beck’s show ends up completely ad-content free.

So, how about this for an idea to really get under Glenn Beck’s skin?

Ignore him. Completely. No matter how flippin’ outrageous he gets ( and make no mistake about it, he will get even more outrageous as time goes on).

But if we totally ignore him, he has to re-target his outrage. Sooner than later, without the progressive blogosphere feeding into his noise machine, he will trip himself up. He will say or do something sooooooo outlandish and outrageous that either a) law enforcement will show up, cuff him, and render him to a halal-on-a-stick stand in Islamabad, or b) even his most rabid followers will eventually perk their ears up, cock their heads like Nipper the RCA dog, and say, “WTF???”

I’m tellin’ ya, our energies are better used and utilized elsewhere. How many minutes will Olbermann (or Rachel, or Ed, or all of us collectively) expend on Beck this week that could be better spent on either HCR, Afghanistan, climate change, or catching a few last rays before the angle of the sun in the Northern Hempisphere brings the sunburn index down to around 2?

Maybe it’s time to ignore the Beck troll and see what happens.