How is Journolist like a Sex Tape?

People have offered $100,000 for both of them. As Beck said today, the mouth of hell is about to open. I didn't know what he was talking about at the time. He admitted that he isn't proud of his behavior before about 10 years ago.

It's interesting how repentance, as opposed to facile apologies, immunizes people from attacks on their past. Repentance means more than just regret. It means change, literally 'turning around' or 'turning back.'

The first group of links at Memorandum today are all attacks on Beck and the Restore Honor gathering. But I like Ross Douthat's comment, "In a sense, Beck's 'Restoring Honor' was like an Obama rally through the looking glass." James Taranto adds, "Watching news coverage of Saturday's uplifting, pietistic speeches reminded us, too, of the prepresidential Obama--not the Obama of 2008 and the bizarre personality cult, but the Obama of 2004, who in his Democratic National Convention speech urged listeners to rise above identity politics." Both agree that the rally took on political tones, but I don't think that was the intent. It wouldn't even have been controversial if there weren't so many anti-American voices in the media today. You just couldn't have Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin and not have it seen as a political rally.

Taranto continues:

Douthat makes one serious error. True, the Beck rally was about "identity politics." But the identity being celebrated was not that of "middle-class white Christians," even if many of the attendees can be stuffed into that pigeonhole, but of Americans. The message resonated, and had political content, because, as we argued Friday, the country is currently governed by an oikophobic self-anointed elite that is unable to hide its contempt for Americans qua Americans.

That was clear in much of the news coverage. NewsBusters.org catches ABC News's Christiane Amanpour trying to explain it all:

it was about--as speaker after speaker kept saying--restoring patriotism and proud-to-be-an-American. I point that out because I think that is what gets such a big cheer from people. And perhaps when we try to figure out why there's such a huge number of people coming to these rallies, in a period of time when people feel such anxiety, such anger, such sort of worry about what's going on around them--the economy and the rest--they come here and they hear a feel-good message, and that they respond to.

As NewsBusters' Mark Finkelstein observes, "Sounds like Amanpour sees religion and patriotism as . . . the opiate of the masses." Yep, Marxism Lite.