One of the worst movies ever made is a murky, ultra-low-budget work called The Beast of Yucca Flats (delightfully savaged on Mystery Science Theater 3000), in which director Coleman Francis combines shots of a radiation-scarred Tor Johnson wandering the desert landscape with meandering narration prone to random statements like, “Flag on the moon. How did it get there?”

When Glenn Beck wasn't rehashing discredited falsehoods during his second day of George Soros-bashing on his Fox News show, he was doing his best Coleman Francis imitation by spending an entire segment trying to cobble together a scary Soros conspiracy out of a Van Jones quote, two words from a Soros-funded group, and a document smuggled out of Communist-era Czechoslovakia.

First, Beck highlighted a statement by Beck bête noire Van Jones, who Beck said “cloaked a message here in peace and love.” Jones said, “You handle the top down, but it's also bottom up and inside out.” Beck declared that this is “a tried-and-true technique that communists used to crush people of a nation”: Install “the right radicals” in power, then add radicals at the bottom “to cause chaos.”

Later, Beck described how the Institute for Policy Studies, which has received funding from Soros, “came out with their annual report that literally says outside inside. Outside pressure and inside strategy. What does that mean? It's just a different way of saying up and down pressure.” Beck derived great meaning from the words “outside” and “inside” being printed on the cover of the report.

Of course, such a strategy is nothing new -- it's used by pretty much every policy group seeking to effect change, regardless of ideology or agenda. It can be argued that the tea party movement is a combination of bottom-up grassroots efforts and top-down pressure from groups like FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity. Likewise, Beck and tea party activists could be said to be operating from the “outside” while members of Congress like Jim DeMint and Michelle Bachmann operate from the “inside.” It's also used on an international level; for instance, in dealing with China on the issue of monetary policy, the U.S. uses a combination of inside negotiation and outside pressure. For Beck to portray such tactics solely as the province of socialist agitators is disingenuous.

And guess who else believes in creating pressure from the outside in and from the bottom up? Sarah Palin. From her resignation speech as Alaska governor:

Now, despite this, I don't want any Alaskan dissuaded from entering politics after seeing this REAL “climate change” that began in August... no, we NEED hardworking, average Americans fighting for what's right! And I will support you because we need YOU and YOU can effect change, and I can too on the outside.

We need those who will respect our Constitution where government's supposed to serve from the BOTTOM UP, not move toward this TOP DOWN big government take-over... but rather, will be protectors of individual rights - who also have enough common sense to acknowledge when conditions have drastically changed and are willing to call an audible and pass the ball when it's time so the team can win! And that is what I'm doing!

Jones' quote and the IPS report, Beck declared, are proof of the five-point plan Soros is using in his quest to take over America (or something) because the Communists used the same “inside out” methods to take over Czechoslovakia after World War II. Beck's claim is, of course, completely absurd and nonsensical.

His evidence for his claim that the Czechoslovakian Communists used this “inside out” method was a strategy paper by communist party official Jan Kozak describing the methodology of the takeover. Beck added: “He wrote this essay and it was never intended to go public. But it accidentally did. We found it in a very old copy of the congressional records.”

Like much of the rest of his anti-Soros screed, Beck is embellishing the story behind Kozak's document. Beck didn't need to skulk around in “a very old copy of the congressional records” -- he could have easily purchased a copy on Amazon, where it's sold under the title And Not A Shot Is Fired. Or, better yet, he could have found it for free on Scribd. Indeed, the introduction to the 1999 edition of the book states that “by the beginning of 1962 Kozak's manual was being widely distributed in several languages throughout Europe and the United States,” with one English translation published by none other than Radio Free Europe.

The far-right John Birch Society is particularly enamored by this book, even reprinting a review of it last year “especially for those who viewed Glenn Beck's programs this week about the 1969 radical manifesto, 'You Don't Need A Weatherman To Know Which Way The Wind Blows.' ”

Beck's portrayal of Soros using communist Czechoslovakia as the model for his supposed takeover of America conveniently overlooks the fact that, as Beck pointed out yesterday, Soros helped support Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution -- which overthrew the very same Communist regime he is purportedly emulating. (Of course, Beck didn't mention that government the Velvet Revolution overthrew was Communist; in fact, all the regimes that Soros helped to overthrow were authoritarian or Communist or deeply corrupt.)

Beck ran out of material with which to smear Soros on this show, so all he was left with was stuff like this. All that was missing was Beck asking how that flag on the moon got there.