Here's my beef with Rod Dreher

In his Dallas News editorial denouncing Glenn Beck:

There are conservatives who know perfectly well that Beck is an unhinged buffoon who traffics in crude, ridiculous ideas. But unlike the hapless GOP, he's popular and effective in the political war against Obama. So these conservative cynics adopt a "no enemies to the right" approach to Beck, even though he's mainstreaming the ooga-booga worldview of a crank prophet who believed, with the John Birch Society, that Eisenhower was a closet commie.

This is foolish. Not every enemy of Obama is a friend to conservatism. In 1962, in a time when conservatives needed all the help they could get, William F. Buckley nevertheless published in National Review a lengthy denunciation of paranoid Bircher Robert Welch. How long, Buckley asked, can the right tolerate his malicious gibberish without losing credibility? National Review eventually sidelined the Birchers for good over their "psychosis of conspiracy," thus doing the right an enormous service by making conservatism more credible with the American mainstream.

Where the hell are the "credentialed" conservatives in this fight? Oh, right, they're at NRO making disparaging remarks about Sarah Palin or any other conservative that isn't part of some elite Beltway country club. Look, I don't really know all that much about Glenn Beck, and Dreher might be right about his associations. But can Dreher point me in a direction of another conservative who's doing as much to defend America from the Obama administration?

In fact, out of all the conservative think tanks and groups that are out there, have any of them had as much an effect as Glenn Beck? Anybody? I mean, I more than willing to step back and admit when I'm wrong, and if someone out there can point me to someone who's done more than Glenn Beck, show them to me. Point them out. Andrew Breitbart and Big Government helped expose ACORN, but Glenn Beck was railing against ACORN as well. And Glenn Beck helped push the Big Government ACORN expose on national TV.

So I'm more inclined to go with this guy:

Although there is more in John’s post - much more even - the main point can be summarized in one short sentence: without Beck, the Obama administration would not have had to deal with any controversies.

Without Beck the far left would not have been exposed.

Many would undoubtedly have liked it to be different but the FrontPageMag editor is right. Beck is the only national figure willing to take on the extreme left and to prove that Obama has ties to them and may even be one of them.

That’s it; it is time for conservatives to stop criticizing Beck and to give him credit for helping the conservative movement take on the most progressive individuals ever to be in charge of the most powerful country on earth.

Both stories found here.