Hysteria about the Glenn Beck rally

By Rick Morris

The sheer amount of sewage churned out about yesterday’s Glenn Beck rally at the Lincoln Memorial would be unbelievable in any other age, but not this one, unfortunately.

Much of the innuendo has been hurled by Tingle Up The Leg Matthews, who is eager to hurl as much mud as he can to stave off his hero’s coming demise in the midterm elections. His scummy suggestions of racism – as is the norm these days, not with the actual nards to make an accusation, but subtle editorializing – have included some of the following questions:

1 “Restoring honor? Who are you saying stole it?”

2 “Take back our country? From whom?”

For the benefit of the mentally unfortunate who find Matthews profound, let me answer both of them:

1 Beck is speaking of a general restoration of honor that is necessary. The path that our country is going down – not “Capital S Socialism,” but the softer, Western European style – has been in the works for many decades. Essentially, Obama represents the third wave of progressive action in this country, with FDR’s New Deal in the 1930s having come first and LBJ’s Great Society in the 1960s having built upon it. There are those who find this consolidation disturbing and not in the spirit of our Founding Fathers and they are entitled to raise their voices about it – yes, Mathews, even if a black guy is president at the time. Imagine that!

2 Beck is speaking, in general, of taking back our country from those who are taking us down the aforementioned path and leading us into an unsustainable economic future that could only result in national bankruptcy. Again, horror of horrors to the progressives, the right to free speech in this country was not repealed when a minority moved into the Oval Office.

Having said that, I’m glad that Beck banned signs from the rally, not because I fear Tea Party folks showing racism – from the one event I’ve been to, race could not have been further from the agenda and I strongly believe that is the norm – but because lefties have been talking about crashing Tea Party events with their own racist signs to cause bad publicity.

Now, do I believe in everything that all of these people believe? No, of course not. I’m not in agreement with Beck’s recent libertarian pronouncement on gay marriage. And Sarah Palin’s recent turn towards hard-core militarism (showing that she may have been sadly brain-napped by the bloodthirsty Bill Kristol in the same way that Dubya once was) alarms me. But I’m not going to be out there wetting my pants about them gathering up a bunch of good, decent Americans the way that so many weeping liberals are.

Here are Beck and Palin addressing those patriots on the National Mall yesterday.