Beck = Wallace?

...that's Frank Rich's comparison in his Sunday column:

This is right-wing populism in the classic American style, as inchoate and paranoid as that hawked by Father Coughlin during the Great Depression and George Wallace in the late 1960s. Wallace is most remembered for his racism, but he, like Beck, also played on the class and cultural resentment of those sharing his view that there wasn’t “a dime’s worth of difference” between the two parties.

The potential for violence is longer an elephant in the room. Now everyone seems to be talking and writing about the danger in the air now, and the danger in Dallas when Kennedy was assassinated...though Oswald was a communistphile. And now the net and the other massive-media that have come along since 1963 act as a giant megaphone for individual rant-crazed nuts. I remember a friend who last year was reluctant to vote for then-candidate Obama because of that same fear for his safety. Now President Obama he has the entire secret service as a full-time security force. And there may be more fear than before. In his column, Rich says Joe Wilson's shouted insult to the President was akin to yelling "fire" in a crowded theater...the classic case that's cited as an example of when it is OK to ban certain speech. He doesn't follow through though, he doesn't suggest Beck be muzzled. And anyway, that's not possible. There will always be some media willing to give voice to somebody who's been tossed by the MSM like FOX, advertisers or no advertisers.