If you didn’t hear about this, you really missed out.

It seems that a couple of days ago Glenn Beck was on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show on Fox Business, and he said that since Newt Gingrich was every bit as much of a progressive socialist as Barack Obama the only reason somebody from the Tea Party would be for Gingrich over Obama is that somebody is a racist.

Beck says he was being facetious when he made the statement. Watch it and judge for yourself.

Lots of people didn’t believe Beck was facetious. One of them was Andrew Breitbart, who absolutely crushed Beck on a podcast radio show in which he offered up a litany of gripes lots of people in the conservative blogosphere have against Beck.

One thing you really don’t want to do if you want to stay on Breitbart’s good side is to accuse the Tea Party of being a bunch of racists. He’s fought that slur continuously, particularly since the Congressional Black Caucus and the Democrat Party concocted the fraud that Congressmen like John Lewis and Andre Carson had the “N-word” repeatedly thrown at them by a crowd of Tea Party demonstrators on that Saturday last March when Obamacare was voted into being in the House.

And given Breitbart’s nasty history with Beck, particular given the latter’s treatment of the former where the Shirley Sherrod story was concerned (Beck screwed that thing up in royal fashion), it’s not surprising that Breitbart would take the opportunity afforded to him by this latest mistake to lambaste Beck in the strongest possible terms.

These guys don’t like each other.

And frankly, even though Beck might well be the more entertaining personality of the two, Breitbart is very much in the right here. Regardless of the other problems he might have with Beck, the fact is you’d have to be a moron to conclude there’s no difference between Newt Gingrich and Barack Obama other than race.

Can you make the argument that Gingrich isn’t a dyed-in-the-wool conservative? Yes. He’s dabbled in lots of different policy options, and some of them involve making common cause or accomodations with the Left. None of them appear in his current campaign agenda, which means that accusations of Gingrich-as-closet-Lefty are based on taking him at all his worst positions and failing to afford him any potential for growth or evolution as the GOP and the conservative movement has shifted to a more libertarian/small government orientation and away from the Big Government conservatism of the Bush years.

But even at the worst evaluation of Gingrich from the Right, you still have the fact that when he was the Speaker of the House the federal budget was balanced and fundamental reforms of major federal entitlements were enacted. Compare that with the leftist idiocy of the current administration and it’s a Night and Day difference. No serious observer of federal policy would place these two men on the same side of the political aisle.

So Beck has no leg to stand on. And his statements greatly damage his credibility with his own audience at a time when he’s attempting to build a web-based video property out of whole cloth.

We didn’t think Glenn Beck would end up as the Keith Olbermann of conservative punditry. But that’s the direction he’s moving in if he continues to make the kinds of statements he made on Napolitano’s show.