What Glenn Beck's New War Looks Like

As he sets out to find libertarian "Woodwards and Bernsteins" in transforming his online news operation, Glenn Beck is breaking ranks even further with the other big libertarian in the room — Alex Jones, who lit an online firestorm over his gun-rights meltdown on Piers Morgan Tonight and whom Beck just called a "crazy person."

As he sets out to find libertarian "Woodwards and Bernsteins" in transforming his online news operation, Glenn Beck is breaking ranks even further with the other big libertarian in the room — Alex Jones, who lit an online firestorm over his gun-rights meltdown on Piers Morgan Tonight and whom Beck just called a "crazy person."

In the Jones-Morgan debacle, and his just announced relaunch of The Blaze, Beck appears to have found an immediate opportunity to snuff out a rival, telling his devout right-wing following to disown Jones. Here's what Beck said about his longtime radio enemy on his show last night, directly calling into question Jones's conservative credentials:

Piers Morgan is trying to have gun control. He is trying to make everybody who has guns and who believes in the Second Amendment to be a deterrent to an out of control government look like a madman. So now he immediately books the madman and makes him look like a conservative. He’s not a conservative.

So according to Beck, not only is Jones crazy — but he's also dumb enough to get played by  that CNN guy conservatives are trying to kick out of the country. Ouch. It's important to remember that these Beck and Jone never liked each other all that much. Back in 2011, Jones told New York's Joe Hagan that Beck ripped off his schtick, rode it to popularity, and cashed it in: "It's very, very painful to see this biological android, a complete actor, reading off teleprompters and singing and dancing around and prancing around, a fairy dancing and prancing around, using my material," Jones said.

Let's get this straight. If Jones is calling Beck the android of libertarian talk and a copycat, and Beck is calling Jones a "crazy person" who is "giving the left the perfect poster boy for their attempts to paint every logical conservative as an extremist nut job," who wins? The madman or the cynical madman ripoff?

Beck is gambling on himself, announcing Tuesday that he has plans to relaunch his fledgling online media organization The Blaze. "Beck said he plans to open three foreign bureaus and launch a half-hour newsmagazine program. He placed photos of MSNBC's Chris Matthews and Fox News' Sean Hannity on a screen and lamented the hyper-partisan nature of cable news, vowing that his network would provide viewers with a libertarian alternative," reports HuffPo. And it doesn't hurt Beck to have one less conservative "poster boy" to compete with — not that Jones is exactly going away, but still.