About a year and a half ago, Glenn Beck did this bit that I thought, at the time, was the dumbest thing ever written. I was googling for some specific info on health care reform today, and I found a link to his site. I thought I’d click on it because – in all sincerity – I’m so mad about this, I thought it’d be neat if this were actually the one spot on the Venn diagram on which Beck and I overlap.

It’s not. But he does manage to make a comparison to the NFL again – as he did in the previous bit – that’s supposed to be convincing, but which is actually totally fucking clueless about the subject on which he speaks.

This time out, he compares the NFL’s helmet policy to health care, insisting that, since players in the NFL get the best helmets in the world, they’re reckless when playing and thus get more concussions. In Australia, meanwhile, they don’t wear helmets, and are therefore cautious, meaning they suffer 25% fewer concussions – and uninsured Americans are just like Australian footballers, being super cautious not to do anything that can get them sick.

While that’s absolutely absurd on its face, it gets dumber when you notice two important details.

1. There are twice as many teams in the NFL as in the Australian Football League, nearly a thousand more players, and the season involves 80 more games.

2. American football and Australian football are two totally different games that just have the same name. This would be like insisting that American poker, where you sit around a table and play cards, is safer than Australian poker, which I just made up, and in which players bash each other in their helmeted heads with fireplace pokers, because Americans are naturally more cautious when engaging in sport. The reason there are fewer head injuries in Australian football is because giant men aren’t running into each other from dozens of yards away at full speed. They don’t do that because the games are totally different and one of them is naturally less likely to cause head injuries.

So, yeah. It’s not exactly news that Glenn Beck is a fucking idiot, but it makes me feel better, sometimes, to point it out.