Poor Greg Gutfeld, the former Huffington Post blogger, has been hosting a 3 a.m. talk show on Fox for years now, and Fox refuses to move his show to a time when people would actually watch it. Instead they just stuck him on this “Five” panel, allowing him to make his hack jokes during the daylight hours for a change.

The rest of the panel is racist tool Eric Bolling, Fox liberal Bob Beckel, former Bush flack Dana Perino, and utterly generic right-wing commentator Andrea Tantaros. (Yep, one Democrat, and he’s a Carter administration vet and Mondale campaign guy.)

I could tell this show was in trouble when I didn’t receive a single Media Matters blast email alert about something awful that happened on “The Five” either Monday or Tuesday. Sure, MMFA covered it, but nothing was offensive or shameless enough to warrant causing a fuss. You think that’s going to retain the Beck audience? Some sexist jokes?

I’m not holding out much hope for “The Five.” But, you know, Alex Jones is probably available.

If you’re watching and you’d like to participate, use the hashtag #salonbeck.

Because his show was so far to the right of the mainstream that it made the rest of Fox’s programming look suddenly reserved by comparison, everyone in the lamestream media spent a lot of time putting Beck on the front pages of magazines and helping him to promote his various moneymaking ventures. (The liberal media expounded a great deal of energy on trying to show people just how fringey Beck’s entire worldview is, to some success.)

We’ll never forget his blackboards and on-screen graphics exposing just how far the great Progressive Conspiracy goes (spoiler: all the way to the top), even though most of us will now go back to not being particularly worried about the modern-day influence of Walter Lippmann.

It was fun when Beck had an incredibly awkward interview with Eric Massa. It was less fun when Beck spent a week unleashing a series of blatantly anti-Semitic attacks on George Soros while also calling him a Nazi. It was the least fun of all when that guy wanted to shoot up the Tides Foundation because Beck basically told him to. But most of all, especially toward the end, it all got a bit … boring. The audience dropped off. The uprisings and demonstrations in the Middle East had no coherent place in Beck’s conspiracies. He got too revival tent and not enough Alex Jones to keep people interested. He seems more interested in being some sort of right-wing Mormon race-baiting lifestyle guru, now, which the world is not really crying out for.

Beck isn’t really completely going away, of course, but his new narrow-casting model ensures that only his followers most enamored with his constant operatic self-aggrandizement will pay him much mind going forward. MediaMatters may sign up for a subscription to his new video news service, but I definitely won’t.

Not that anyone should mistake the souring of the Fox-Beck relationship as some sort of victory. The worst people at Fox — the most insidious and vile by far — are actually more like Steve Doocy and Megyn Kelly, who spew constant streams of deliberate misinformation through resentful sneers in the guise of “news.” Those two are probably more responsible for your older Fox-watching relatives constantly repeating idiotic Republican talking points than Beck.

We’re apt to believe Carr (who didn’t respond to an email from us) and write the whole thing off as a jokey misfire and desperate Fox campaigning. But we were interested in where that wonderful, vividly demeaning expression — “dance of the low, sloping foreheads” — came from.

Undoubtedly, “low, sloping foreheads” is a reference to the Neanderthals, our phylogenetic cousins, whose skulls were, indeed, low and sloped. Poet William Carlos Williams used that expression to portray, in more sympathetic terms, the plight of downtrodden townspeople in New Jersey, in his mid-century epic poem “Paterson” (1963): 


                low, sloping foreheads

The flat skulls with the unkempt black or blond hair,

The ugly legs of the young girls, pistons

Too powerful for delicacy!

The women’s wrists, the men’s arms red

Used to heat and cold, to toss quartered beeves

And barrels, and milk-cans, and crates of fruit.

As for the full idiom, one other writer appears to have employed the expression “dance of the low-sloping foreheads”: the Weekly Standard’s Matt Labash, in a piece about the 2000 Florida election debacle, to describe the hapless voters confused by that notorious butterfly ballot. 

But that piece came out in November 2000 (and the expression was thrashed by Todd Gitlin in this Salon piece for “defending idiotic electoral arrangements [and] smirking at subliterate Florida voters”). Carr already had a history of using the expression before that. (Did Labash pick it up from Carr? We put in a call to Labash but never heard back.)

Here are, most recent to earliest, invocations of the phrase from Carr:

• Referring to Internet commenters: Speaking at the American Society of News Editors’ annual conference in April 2010, Carr referred to the rising prominence of anonymous commenting on the Internet by saying, “Comments become the dance of the low, sloping foreheads.”
• About certain views on Fox viewers: In a 2004 review of the book “Crazy Like a Fox,” by Scott Collins, Carr said: “While the smart set would love to write off the dominion of Fox News — from worst to first — as the triumph of the low, sloping foreheads, Collins demonstrates that Fox News won the war by redefining the battle.”
• VHI stars: In a 2005 column about MTV and its stable of sister networks, Carr  says, “MTV’s older sister, VH1, which seemed to be tipping into irrelevance, was repositioned with a B-list nation of talent, a dance of the low sloping foreheads that made viewers feel both superior and engaged.” 
• “Blade Runner” actress Sean Young: When Carr ran the New York Times’ Carpetbagger blog in 2008, he titled a post “The Dance of the Low Sloping Foreheads.” The forehead in this instance was actress Sean Young, who heckled director Julian Schnabel during an acceptance speech at that year’s Director’s Guild Awards. (Young checked into rehab for alcohol abuse mere days later.) 
• Fellow addicts: In his 2009 memoir, “The Night of the Gun,” David Carr describes a portion of a stint in rehab by saying, “I skipped the dance of the low-sloping foreheads — oh, I mean quality time with my fellow addicts in the meds line …”
• The subjects of writer Eddie Dean: In August 1999,  Carr (then editor of the Washington City Paper) described his writer, Dean, as “the chronicler of the ‘dance of the low, sloping foreheads.’” In elaborating, Carr went on to describe Dean’s style by saying, “At his best, he produces low-to-the-ground gothics, full of horror and laughter and regular people doing irregular things …”

So Carr, it appears, is the man who animated the caveman. We asked Dean how he thought his editor conjured the phrase. He told us: “Like the late great Lester Young, Carr has his own lingo that is part street poetry and part secret-code, and you’d need a hepcat’s dream-book thesaurus (as yet unpublished) to fully discern what he actually says much of the time.”

Here’s the comment that set it all in motion:

Glenn Beck is the most obvious and tacky about it, and he has learned that there is essentially no downside to being obvious and tacky about it. He is a very rich man and still inventing ways of getting richer by bleeding his incredibly devoted followers. He is now asking them to directly send him money in order to watch his show, which was formerly included in the cost of people’s cable or satellite subscriptions.

Of course these talk radio hosts are shameless hucksters — they’re on talk radio — but the hucksterism is not limited to the former morning zoo DJs who make up the intellectual vanguard of the movement. Virtually everyone who is famous for being conservative — or simply famous and conservative — is making a killing, or at least attempting to. In 2009, the Boston Phoenix calculated that there was about $2 billion floating around the right-wing nonprofit network. As Jonathan Bernstein wrote, this money changes incentives for political actors:

Normal political incentives are still important in determining how politicians act — Hill Republicans move to the right because they’re terrified that they will be the next Bob Bennett, the Utah Senator who was defeated for renomination by obscure Tea Party candidate, now Senator, Mike Lee. But the fact that there’s easy money to be had by being a famous (or perhaps notorious) conservative adds a whole other set of incentives to act extreme.

In short: In today’s conservative marketplace, crazy equals money.

The proof is that even Alan Keyes makes a good living. From the Phoenix story:

Keyes and his loyalists now operate a for-profit Web site; a number of PACs and not-for-profit organizations focused on abortion (Life and Liberty PAC), immigration (Minuteman Civil Defense Corps), and economic populism (Declaration Alliance); a consulting firm (Politechs); a political-research firm (Primer Research); a political Web consultancy (Strategic Internet Campaign Management); a political media firm (Mountaintop Media); a mailing-list provider (Response Unlimited); an online-fundraising site (rightmarch.com); and a media-relations company (Diener Consulting) — many of which operate out of the same address.

Most of the money comes from buying and selling lists of names of suckers. Some nonprofits receive millions in donations and give it to marketing and direct-mail companies controlled by the nonprofits’ managers. Even the “reputable” right-wing think tanks exist as part of a donor-funded full-employment plan for right-wing thinkers. There is always a comfy “fellowship” available at CEI to the writer who declines to believe that CO2 emissions cause climate change. A well-connected right-wing book author is guaranteed a best-seller, thanks to bulk orders and the aforementioned book clubs.

Even right-wingers unlucky enough to work for newspapers can get paid, as David Frum explained at the Week:

There are conservative television personalities and staff writers on important conservative newspapers who operate consulting companies that can be hired by companies and individuals who might well have an interest in influencing what these personalities and staff writers have to say. So far, I’ve heard of no case of a politician buying such promotion. But as talk radio comes under increasing economic pressure due to dropping advertising rates and aging audience demographics, who knows what revenue-enhancing methods may be tried in the future?

Please, David, name names!

But the talk radio ones still do it with the most shamelessness. John Cook introduces us to “Tea If By Tea,” the … iced tea sold by Rush Limbaugh, for about $2 a bottle. Why on earth would you buy iced tea from Rush Limbaugh? As a product, it makes a bit less sense to me than Dan Aykroyd’s crystal skull vodka, but I imagine it will be terribly profitable.