Along with Beck’s show itself, of course.

I’ve been avoiding the political commentary on this blog for a while but this is just too darned interesting to ignore. You heard it here last, folks…. Glenn Beck is losing his show on Fox News.

I am pleased, but not exactly surprised. The writing has been on the wall for Beck for quite some time now, as sponsors flee, fearing being associated with his particular brand of full on hardcore looney tunes craziness. For a long time, his name was synonymous with Fox News, as he was their manic Pied Piper, and as long as he was red hot in the ratings and had millions of senile citizens all too eager to follow him into the magical world where nothing is ever or has ever been or could ever be their fault. that was fine.

But a crazed pedagogue like Beck has a short shelf life. As pollsters have noted, his appeal was based on creating sensation, like a magician who dazzles his audience with increasingly elaborate tricks like making Bush’s spending spree disappear and turning Barack Obama’s blackness into a condemnation of everything that has happened since Eisenhower. And to his credit, he wove a web of stardust and evil that kept people spellbound for oh, a year or two.

But eventually, even the maddest of genius magicians runs out of tricks, and when you are an embarrassment like Beck, it is only your ability to keep your audience spellbound and therefore uncritical that keeps the humiliation of being associated with such deranged flimflammery from biting into your audience’s desire to feel they are socially normal. Once the pace slackened even slightly, the strong desire of social conservatives to appear not merely normal but super-normal begins to take its toll, and when the sponsors started to flee in droves, that was the sign that Beck was clearly on the crazy and weird side of things no matter what his political stripe might be.

The moment some little old lady gets laughed at (or worse, sweetly patronized) by her peers for quoting Glenn Beck at the CWL meeting, you know that all the mockery has done its job and Glenn Beck is a joke and if there is one thing serious minded social conservatives cannot stand, it’s being mocked as weird.

The direct link, in my mind, between the advertisers fleeing and the death of Beck is that as your more normal and usual sponsors fled, the nature of the advertising on his show simply got less and less respectable and more and more shady and kooky seeming, and that is the kind of thing which makes social conservatives very nervous. If Glenn’s show was a neighborhood, then the decline in sponsors made it an increasingly sketchy and outlandish one, and that, more than any failure in the appeal of his message or change of heart about convervatism, will doom any conservative pundit in a heartbeat.

They just simply cannot standing the thought of someone thinking they were “that kind of person”. It is really just that simple.

And of course, as other are saying, it was clear that the other pundits on Fox were never very fond of Beck. He was embarrassing and outlandish and stole their spotlight, which was bad enough, but even worse, because he worked so much on sheer inspiration and a fine tuned sense of the madness of his particular crowd, he was constantly shifting the ground under their feet and making it so that even the Bill O’Reilly types simply could not keep up. All they could do is follow behind him and try to pretend that this all made sense to them while gritting their teeth and biding their time, waiting for his star to fall.

And fall it has, and there are all his friendly friends at Fox and Friends waiting, daggers drawn, in the rotunda. Presumably, there have been people at Fox soothing each other’s Beck rage by saying “Just you wait, the minute that little fucker loses steam, he is out of here. ”

And lo and behold, so he is.

My only worry is that without Beck constantly injecting random momentum into the GOP’s opinion machine, they might actually be able to calm down enough to put together a coherent strategy for 2012 and might even produce a vaguely electable candidate.

The good news is, all those Tea Party loons are still out there, refusing to consider sanity as an alternative and rejecting all possibility of compromise, so odds are, they will still doom the party even without fresh Beck injections on Fox every day.

And hey, odds are they will still be able to find Beck on whatever he does next anyhow. Loon or not, he still brings millions of people to advertisers, however shady, and someone will pay him for that. Or barring that, he will just become another YouTube and/or podcast pundit.

Keep doing your good work for America, Glenn. We’re pulling for you.