Just in case he actually runs for office, the Leftist media is already planning one line of attack against Glenn Beck.  They’re thinking that they can nail him on taxes, just as he went after so many Democrats who were found, wittingly or not, to have underpaid their taxes:

No one has been less forgiving than Glenn Beck when it comes to Democrats with tax problems. Not just the well-known ones like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner but also less serious ones such as Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, whose husband only recently paid off $6,400 in tax liens on his auto repair business, and Nancy Killefer, who withdrew her nomination to be White House chief performance officer, citing a $946.69 tax lien on her Washington home.

Their tax issues are just one indicator of “a culture of corruption among some of the left,” Beck declared just last month in a segment on his hugely popular Fox News television show, in which he branded Geithner, Killefer, Solis and a handful of other Obama nominees “tax cheats,” whom he wouldn’t trust “with my children, let alone my children’s future.”

Mocking the excuses offered by the nominees, Beck sarcastically intoned: “Oh, the tax thing, it was an accident. It was my husband’s fault. I didn’t do it, he did it. I didn’t mean to do it. I was just working hard for the people.”

So what to make, then, of the fact that Beck has had his own minor tax problems over the past few years?

As Beck evolved from a medium-market local radio personality to a one-man media empire with top-rated radio and television shows, best-selling books, a monthly magazine and a traveling one-man comedy tour, his production company, Mercury Radio Arts, has at times struggled to keep up with the heightened tax and filing demands accompanying his success.

The same article goes on to explain, at some length, the nature of Beck’s problems, and to point out that they parallel the problems many on the Left had in trying to comply with their tax obligations:  the tax code is so complicated, it’s hard to get it right.

And it’s that last little point that makes me think that I wouldn’t care, and most people wouldn’t care, if Glenn Beck ran (which I think is a bad idea for other reasons) and the Left tried to smear him with tax issues.  You see, what distinguishes Beck from the Left is that Beck, as a pro-individual, anti-government guy, he isn’t in favor of constantly increasing the tax burden on ordinary Americans.  Likewise, Beck, unlike Charles Rangel, isn’t writing the tax code.  Also, Beck, unlike Tim Geithner, isn’t being put in charge of America’s economy.  So yes, Beck has in common with Leftist politicians the fact that he too can’t figure out what the heck is going on tax-wise, but he parts ways with them in that he is neither a government employee, nor is he a big government maven.  Someone who works for the government, and wants to increase the tax burdens the government places on ordinary citizens, has a much, much higher duty than anyone else to get it right.

After House Vote, Rangel Still Ways and Means Chairman

The 6 Republicans who voted in favor of keeping the tax cheat I bet are not  running for office any time soon.
The two Dems should be rewarded with a medal.
The 246 who thought that keeping him was a good idea are in need of a dictionary and a moral compass.
300 million Americans just got ‘w’rangled.

Lie and cheat and you still get to keep your job.
No wonder Charlie hasn’t been in rush to pay his debts – it enhanced his resume.

I wrote the following for American Thinker, and republish it here:

Root Causes

One of the hallmarks of the Left is its fervent belief that, if poor people behave badly, the fault is not theirs, but instead it lies with “root causes.” For example, a word search in the New York Times for “root causes and crime” returns over 100 articles from that newspaper alone.

A significant number of these Times articles, which were especially prevalent in the 1980s and 1990s, have a politician arguing that, in dealing with crime, it’s pointless to punish the criminals themselves. Instead, it’s the government’s job to destroy crime at its root, a concept that invariably translates into pouring more money into social welfare programs. I’ve gathered a small collection of these articles. In each of them, I’ve emphasized a few key words, the significance of which I’ll explain below.

In 1987, New York Police Chief Benjamin War shocked the liberal establishment by stating one of New York’s dirty little secrets: Young black men were disproportionately responsible for the City’s crime. The liberals were quick to respond. Although they couldn’t deny the statistics, they placed the blame squarely where it belonged – on white society and ineffectual (Reagan-era) government:

Poor people historically have been more prone to commit street crime, and blacks are disproportionately poor (though most, of course, are law-abiding). Blacks are uniquely burdened with a legacy of slavery and violence. I. Blame is abundant. So are drugs. Opportunity. is not

[snip]

Unless root causes of crime are addressed, Mr. [Charles] Rangel said, “there will never be enough prosecutors, judges and courts or jails to sweep our secrets under the rug.” (Emphasis mine.)

Three years later, liberals were still singing the same root crime song. Here’s the lead from a 1990 article about Mayor Dinkins:

Mayor David N. Dinkins took his anticrime campaign on the road today as he lobbied here for stricter national gun-control laws and an all-out effort against “the root causes of crime,” including poverty, homelessness, drug addiction and growing despair. (Emphasis mine.)

Fast forward another four years, to the Gubernatorial election 1994, and you’ll see that Mario Cuomo, who was seeking reelection, still knew the words to that root crime tune:

For his part, Mr. Cuomo, especially in recent months, has spoken more about crime’s root causes, of draining what he has begun to call the “poisoned lake” of poverty, racism and lack of opportunity that many people believe is at the heart of violence. At the state trooper graduation in Albany, for example, he complained that “so far we have not discovered the cure for the greed, the viciousness, the despair that drives this traffic in drugs.” (Emphasis mine.)

I could come up with more examples, but I suspect you get the point: In Liberal land, as sure as night follows day, poverty, a lack of opportunity and despair add up to the dangerous pathology of crime.

Barack Obama, however, has taken the root crime concept to a whole new level, by adding pathologies that I suspect, to him, are far more dangerous than garden-variety felonies. Here is the infamous bitterness speech that Obama made before the very rich San Francisco liberals gathered to hear him at the Getty mansion::

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, a lot of them – like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they’ve gone through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, and they cling to guns, or religion, or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Obama’s much more verbose than the others I’ve quoted, but it seems to me he’s seeing precisely the same pattern that Dinkins, Cuomo and Rangel identified: Poverty creates bitterness, and bitterness creates dangerous pathologies.

There is a difference in the speeches, of course. As you see from the quotations, liberals of twenty years back were primitive enough to define as pathologies actual criminal activity (drug use, theft, assault, rape). Obama’s argument makes a dramatic break with that traditional by targeting as pathological, not crime, but standard American beliefs.

To that end, he explicitly says that the garden-variety root causes that have been part of political discourse for twenty years (poverty and despair), when visited upon primitive white Pennsylvanians, inevitably lead to the horrors of faith in God; a belief in the Second Amendment; and a pervasive sense that it is fundamentally unfair for illegal aliens to come waltzing into America so that they can hold American jobs, send their kids to American funded schools, get American healthcare, and dine (not well, admittedly) off of American food stamps.

Already back in the 1980s and 1990s, I was unimpressed by the way in which the “root cause” doctrine was being used to relieve people of any responsibility for their actions. I’m even less impressed with the bizarre new use to which Obama has put it. Nevertheless, despite the theory’s silliness, his making the argument does serve a purpose: While it tells us nothing about Pennsylvanians, it does give us another look into the mind of a man who has a profound disdain for the values that Americans have held dear for centuries.