On Thursday, Beck was revisiting one of his favorite subjects: the hidden history of Barack Obama. Reflecting on how Obama had, as a young man, gone from calling himself Barry to using his given name of Barack, Beck said this:

Beck's history regarding discussions of race speaks for itself. He has said Obama possesses "a deep-seated hatred for white people." Soon after, he defended those remarks, stating once again that, "I think the president is a racist." He has suggested that Obama is seeking to become a "slavemaster." He has pushed the idea that Mexican immigrants want to "reclaim" California and Texas. He called Justice Sonia Sotomayor a "racist" on at least three separate occasions. Beck has portrayed the Democratic health care reform effort as "the beginning of reparations," a theme he has repeated on both his Fox News and radio shows, saying that Obama plans to "settle old racial scores through new social justice." During a discussion of former White House green jobs official Van Jones' past, he baselessly juxtaposed Jones' picture with footage from a riot. He hasclaimed that India lacked "flush toilets" and said that the Ganges sounded like "a disease."

All of these examples are from the last year. The deeper you dig, the worse it gets.

And yet, when Media Matters accused Beck of racial insensitivity, he responded indignantly that "nothing could be further from the truth."

"If you don't see why some people would get upset that you accused the president of adopting his African name in order to repudiate his American identity and connect with his father's radical Kenyan heritage," wrote Media Matters' Simon Maloy yesterday, "then I'm afraid you might be a lost cause."

Indeed, he is -- and he's not interested in being saved. Though he portrays himself as an average Joe just trying to make sense of the world, Beck is actually a wildly successful broadcaster with decades of experience. Everything he does and says is deliberate, and by now, it should be overwhelmingly obvious that he routinely crafts his rhetoric to appeal to the worst impulses in his audience. He insults minorities, and uses racially provocative language and imagery, because he wants to stir resentments among viewers and listeners. There is simply no other way to explain the racially charged content he has made a staple of his work.

Is it any wonder why at least 80 advertisers have fled his Fox News program and civil rights groups have condemned him over his latest comments?