HMM: Video: Glenn Beck goes all in for Doug Hoffman — and third parties. Hoffman’s kind of a special case. There’s basically no downside. That’s not true in 2010. I remember a blog commenter somewhere a while back worrying that Beck would turn out to be a Pied Piper leading people to Third Party self-destruction. In Hoffman’s case that’s not really an issue, but a Perot-type candidacy might put the Dems back in bigtime. “In a perfect world, Doug Hoffman wins and all the purple districts break for ‘true conservatives’ and all federal entitlements are repealed and the income tax is abolished etc etc etc. Assume hypothetically now that the world isn’t perfect. What is the endgame?”

Related discussion here.

UPDATE: Reader C.J. Burch writes, “Gadflies aren’t leaders. Beck is a gadfly. Now gadflies can be effective, even necessary sometimes, just don’t mistake them for leaders. Becoming self-aware is part of growing up.”

And reader Kenneth Mitchell writes: “The ‘endgame’ in an imperfect world is that Hoffman victory – or even Hoffman as a spoiler – convinces the GOP not to nominate extreme RINOs. I support using Hoffman as a club to bash Republicans, because Republicans in general have well earned a bashing. And they don’t seem to have absorbed the lessons from 2006 or 2008.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Jody Green writes in defense of Beck:

I saw Glenn Beck today and the first half of the show was a must watch for young people. I made my two daughters watch it. The Hoffman part was distraction from his real message today which is we are becoming a dependent society where the leaches suck the blood of the producers (My words, not his). It was a well done segment that I have not researched to see if it is online.

P.S. My kids got the message and understood. Good for Glenn Beck making complex issues understandable.

That goes at least a bit beyond gadfly, I think.