David Micah Greenberg analyzes rhetorical flourishes in poetry and politics. Here he addresses Glenn Beck's comparisons as if they were a poetic device:
Progressives are socialists, who are also fascists. Opposites of the political spectrum are identical. Nazi medical experimentation on humans is equivalent to modest health-care reforms. Beck’s repeated lie that “In God We Trust,” and not E Pluribus Unum, was the founders’ motto for this country is emblematic of the underpinnings of this rhetorical strategy. Whereas the founders’ motto suggests distinctions that need be acknowledged in order to achieve unity, the Eisenhower-era motto is a blanketing call to one faith. Beck’s is not simply a strategy of developing false comparison, designed to inflame supporters and shift the terms of debate. The agenda is to take the complexity of historical and political experiences of the twentieth century and bind them together in a totalizing gesture—an apocalyptic gesture. It is apocalyptic because it purports to uncover (from apokálypsis, “revelation”) the hidden similarities among seemingly dissimilar things—black nationalists, the Council on Foreign Relations, Woodrow Wilson, the Federal Reserve—while also eliminating any distinction among them that would appear through consideration of their practice or substance ….
The Dish 