Perhaps Glenn Beck has gone one step beyond. We already knew that Mr. Beck had planned a rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28th, a rally where, following a stirring countrified opening act Mr. Beck will reveal “The Plan” supposedly given to him by God. Yes apparently Martin Luther King had a dream, and Glen Beck has a hallucination.

While specific details of “The Plan” have been hard to come by, Mr. Beck did reveal a brief description on his website, painting “The Plan” as a “100 year plan for America that will provide specific policies, principles, and most important, action steps that each of us can take to play a role in Americas re-founding”. Whether those “action steps” will be chiseled unto a tablet and delivered to Mr. Beck upon a mountain are not known.

In keeping with the “delusions of grandeur” theme though Mr. Beck will also hand out the “Badge of Merit”. An award bestowed by Mr. Beck that will supposedly be more like the “Military Badge of Merit” briefly awarded by George Washington and not the Boy Scout patch given for helping little old ladies cross the street.

You see according to Mr. Beck the “Purple Heart” which serves as the official successor to the “Military Badge of Merit” is a creation of progressives. One that no doubt pales in comparison to the original and Mr. Beck’s update because according to Mr. Beck, the original “had nothing to do with being wounded in action”. According to Mr. Beck the “Military Badge of Merit “had everything to do with doing something of honor and integrity, something where you really put your neck out, not just getting shot…not that that’s…he was trying to build people that understood honor and merit integrity, god”.  Now is such insight from Mr. Beck, a man with as much real military service as my childhood collection of G.I. Joe action figures really worth enough to be insulted by? Yes and no.

On one hand it’s easy to see Glenn Beck for what he truly is and not be threatened or even riled. An opportunistic cartoon who has seized on a golden age of American anger and bent it to his will. Someone who uses the blind faith of his followers as a stepping stone toward the greatness his particular brand of madness permits him to believe he is fated to have. A snake oil salesman and disc jockey with amazing control of his tear ducts but sadly not his free roaming mouth. But Glenn Beck is also a dedicated weapon empowered by that growing theatre of like minded individuals who take Mr. Beck’s words as gospel without dissecting them and seeking even a hint of his numerous self serving motives.

The books, the website, “Fusion Magazine”, the television and the radio show, a burgeoning empire that paid Beck $32 million dollars last year aided by the audacity of Glenn Beck that grows with every controversial outburst. Does Beck know that when he mocks the intelligence of the President’s daughter that he will undoubtedly have to apologize for that misstep moments later? Of course, but that doesn’t dampen the free press and publicity, the focus on the “Big, Bad, Beck” that that gets him. The same is true of Mr. Beck’s comments on Wednesday, impuning the honor and sacrifices of thousands of American soldiers who were wounded or slain on the field of battle, including the U.S. military personnel who died on 9/11. Remarks made primarily to build the mythology of Glenn Beck even though they stand against his usual support of our military including his work with the Special Operations Warriors foundation.

You see for Beck the whispered contradictions and hypocrisy don’t matter. It’s the screaming headlines that advance his cause, the cause of Glenn Beck. And while that may be fine for one lone nut it is in the adoring masses, those who deify, mimic, and take his make believe antics at face value that trouble me because they just don’t seem to realize that cartoon’s are only meant to entertain, not enlighten or emulate.

“What I don’t like from the President’s administration is this sort of, ‘I’ll put my boot heel on the throat of BP,’”-Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate from Kentucky Rand Paul on Good Morning America, adding “I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business.”

Rand Paul has discovered infamy as briskly as he found fame, displaying a harsh and aloof tone in relation to firstly America’s long celebrated civil rights laws and now the growing outrage over a disastrous oil spill that continues to rage out of control.

But while Paul has flipped and flubbed his initial victory tour, creating a firestorm with his remarks and then canceling on “Meet the Press” after what he called, “a long week” he may be exactly what the tea partiers want and what they should fear most.

Now I won’t pretend to hold any admiration for the tea party movement as it is ideologically the Joker to my Batman, but they do deserve respect. Raised from the cobbling of America’s individual screams, born out of frustration and a gnawing pull toward action no political force has identified with or been more in tune with America’s anger in a time of outright fear and utter disappointment the the tea party.

In many ways the tea party movement is the child of the “Hope” and “Change” movement that carried Barack Obama into office. Though ideologically dissimilar both felt the pulse of a nation, at once begging for something new and fresh, while nearly at the same point burning for something genuine, less slick, and perhaps closer to things remembered. It is in essence a forever waged war between the split personality of America, the ideologies of “the bright new horizon” and the “good old days” with different players, different labels, and the same dust ups and lack of a true resolution.

Whether the tea partiers are to be as effective as the Obama movement was in 2008 will likely be a matter settled in the coming years. But based on this primary season it appears as if they are off to a good start. That said, every movement needs a leader, someone in power who can carry the hopes and worries of a mass audience into the halls of power and create lasting change. In that and their ability to create any real legislative change the tea party has failed.

Efforts to thwart the stimulus, health care reform, and of course the election of Barack Obama himself prior to their branding as “tea partiers” have been glaring, while the reactions to those defeats have been much like a tantrum with threats and slight displays of violence that have served to keep this movement away from what it should prize above all else, mainstream appeal. A necessary evil in the pursuit of actual power.

That’s where Rand Paul comes in. The son of conservative deity, Congressman, and former Presidential candidate Ron Paul, Rand shows an appeal that flies close to the “aw shucks” regular guy persona that George W. Bush used to seduce voters (and say what you will about Mr. Bush but he was a successful politician). Its these tools that helped Rand Paul crush GOP establishment pick Trey Grayson in the primary and which make him a natural leader of the tea party movement.

And yet it is his recent statements and the ease with which tea partiers take to and applaud those statements that should be of concern to anyone wishing for a true tea party revolution. A revolution that does more then score election victories against moderate Republicans and a couple of woefully under prepared Democrats. A revolution that captures and holds the attention and admiration of a majority of people in this country.

In much the same way as it was his lack of intellectual curiosity that sunk George W. Bush, making him an unpopular cartoon here and abroad, it is Rand Paul’s intellectual rigidity that may damn him and all that hitch themselves to his wagon. Faithfully libertarian Paul is, as was mentioned before, made to be visibly uncomfortable at the thought of affirming the acceptability of the federal government’s banning of institutional racism in establishments public and private and then fiercely displeased that a President would dare use his bully pulpit to castigate a corporation, a foreign born corporation no less that oversaw one of the larger if not the largest environmental disasters in the history of the United States, raping the natural splendor of the gulf coast, depressing or deadening industries all along the coast in the midst of what is still a fragile recovery from a national economic meltdown.

Is this opening the tent and growing the movement or is Rand Paul and the celebration of him condemning the tea party to the fringes?

Such a question is not for me to answer, only pose. But if the tea party movement and Rand Paul continue to seek an American uprising, a revolution without the support of its people it will continue to feel like an invasion, loud, frightening, and easily undone by its lack of real firepower. Left or right without center is merely a group of shouters dancing in place to the song of their own voices, winning their little tournaments, feasting on the resounding cheers of a puny gathering and accomplishing little or no part of their agenda. That is unless the whole point was just to get on the ballot and make a lot of noise.

We are not in a right world, not basking in the glow of a revolutionary era in so far as the way a man can come up, the way he can live and thrive. There are, limitations. A ceiling on dreams that is impenetrable and in place long before we breath our first breath built by the great and powerful whatever sitting high atop wherever.

Hope is factually an illusion, the cheese on a tether that dances and taunts us. And while it is futility defined, I and you, we cannot, will not cease in our pursuit. We are bound to seek, bound to climb, for as we are all damned with a bitter end we are all damned with an inextinguishable flame.

It bewilders me this sickness of hope, and though I am afflicted, and though I seek no cure it slows me, weighing me down in my every day endeavors, reminding me in the midst of joyless things that this is not how I wish to be. And so I fight and I am scarred, I am bloodied and dragged along the rocks of this unforgiving world because I dare to rise when I should cower, because I laugh over crying and step rather then tumble. A miraculous fool such as me, such as you can be nothing more then the gods deem his limit to be and yet it is in our lack of knowing that limit that we try to leap over it.

I know few things but I know I am destined to die in a state of reach, with eyes focused on the horizon of a better day.

There is a man in Utah about to pay for his crimes in the “eye for an eye” way, his name isn‘t important and I don‘t care to mention it. Someday soon they’ll line up, guns loaded, ready to spit fire and then with a burst his eyes will glaze, and his breath will trail off.

You cant erase a man from this earth fully, he leaves marks, imprints. Even the wicked, the murderers who once swung and were then shot or electrified, silenced by a sanitized needle in a clean room, they don’t get erased. The sins stand, living on forever, the memories and the shattered pieces left behind unable to re-form.

You can say the death penalty is just, say it’s archaic. I’ve got views, everybody does. But don’t dare say that the firing squad is in-humane and then be okay, be supportive of the vast theater of deaths offered within the bounds of our legal system. Don’t try to hide in the soft and shelter of the vast gray area. Blood is blood, and whether its justice or revenge, if you’ve got the taste then it shouldn’t matter how your thirst gets met. Otherwise your just drawing a line in the sand on a windy day.