Glenn Beck was trying real hard yesterday to convince people that his running theory -- that Barack Obama is secretly a Marxist who intends to radically transform America into a communist state -- just might be right.

He compared his theory to the early stages of the Monica-baiting of Clinton in 1998, when everyone was in denial -- because, you see, he thinks eventually he'll be proven right. OK, whatever.

Then he blurted this out:

Beck: I mean, at this point, you have to try to not pay attention. I mean, you have to be working to miss the pattern here. There's so much anti-free-market rhetoric from Obama and his top officials, you'd either have to either be living in a cave in Afghanistan next to Obama, and you can't hear anything that Ob -- uh, Osama is saying because of the goats going, ah-ah-ah, or you're so deeply in love with Obama that you can't detect a single flaw in him.

This is what we'll call a Beckean Slip: An apparent slip of the tongue that is most likely intentional, and at the bare minimum clearly exposes the desire to confuse the public.

It isn't the first time Beck has slipped and mixed up Osama bin Laden's name with President Obama's. And it certainly won't be the last.

However, it does tend to undermine Beck's subsequent claim to having this high-level, all-seeing mind that is "right" about a whole host of things (that he's actually been wrong about). Indeed, it reveals a confused mind incapable of clearly distinguishing between the president of the United States and a cave-dwelling terrorist.

Beck also adds that "I could be wrong" but "I haven't been before"? Um, yeah, except for the dozens of times he actually has been wrong. (Remember when he was predicting that Americans would eventually go for McCain at the polls? That prediction turned out well, didn't it?)

Clearly, his fans are hoping that he'll be proven right, because then they'll be justified in subsequently mounting a violent assault on the White House or something. But with a mind like Beck's concocting the theories, you might have better luck putting a bagful of cats in a roomful of word processors and hoping that Shakespeare's collected sonnets somehow emerge.

All of which raises a question that Glenn Beck should ask himself: What if you're wrong?

Because then, all you have done is smear a boatload of innocent and decent people, dragged their names through the mud, and ruined their careers.

But hey, that doesn't matter, because Glenn Beck is all about values, right? Like the value of his new mansion in Connecticut ... those are the values that matter to Glenn Beck.

Basic decency? Not so much.