John Aravosis jokingly (I think) speculates that Chris Wallace (or Devo) is actually the anonymous backlit voice-distorted “concerned parent” who appeared on Glenn Beck’s show last night, lamenting that his heart sank when Anita Dunn spoke at his son’s high school graduation and described Chairman Mao as one of her “favorite political philosophers.”  (Beck and “Concerned Parent” exaggerate Dunn’s supposed admiration for Mao, but that goes without saying.)

While I am somewhat curious about who “Concerned Parent” is, I’m more interested in the theatrically extreme measures to protect this guy’s identity, all so he can basically say “She said something nice about Mao and it made me sad.”  That’s pretty banal stuff – it’s not like he’s a corporate whistleblower or mob informant sharing Dangerous Secrets That Get People Fired Or Killed.

Of course, he could also be a Fox News staffer or Republican operative, which would be an entirely different reason to conceal his identity.

But I believe that the theatrics are the message.  By going all cloak-and-dagger for this unrevealing waste of time, Beck is reinforcing the paranoid fantasy that he shares with his viewers: The Obama administration is so vindictive and all-powerful that any decent ordinary patriotic American who would dare speak out against it must be disguised so the black UN helicopters don’t spirit their family away to the FEMA camps in the middle of the night.

Of course, this makes Glenn Beck the most courageous man on earth, for fearlessly exposing all of Obama’s many nefarious conspiracies despite the knowledge that he could be brutally silenced at any time.  (And let’s not forget that the Obama administration just declared war on Fox, if you define “declared war” as “pointed out that they are consistently biased and declined to appear on their air while not making any effort to shut them down.”)

His safety is even more precarious when you think about all the scary people making death threats and carrying around assault weapons and making jokes about murdering their political adversaries. Oh wait, those are all Republicans. And Glenn Beck.