Here's what I think Shepard Smith, of Fox News, did last Friday. First he came on the air to broadly mock Glenn Beck for the weird show he was about to do. Then he finished work, probably checked his messages, went home, had a finger of quality bourbon, and unwound himself from the day, in the languid way of confident men. Hopefully, he wasn't forced to watch Glenn Beck's primetime melodrama festival, in which he advanced his Unified Field Theory of All Bad Things Are The Same (Obama is President! Pelosi is also important! Blagojevich! His hair! Weird people in military uniforms! Dollhouse isn't that good! Sales of the new U2 album are stagnant! Sexting!), and then forced himself to pretend to cry - wrack himself with creepy, fake tears - as he talked about "being the person we were on September 12."
Thing is, I like the idea of being those people, who crowded the streets and sang songs and clapped for firemen and broadly demonstrated that there was no reason to ever suspect we would fall to terrorists, because of our simple and unspoken bravery. And then the President basically said that we should all go shopping or take vacations, and then our patriotic warmth got warped into supporting a bunch of ancillary ambitions and fantastic attacks on our liberties in the name of "if you're not with us you're against us." And now, Beck wants to reclaim that moment for his own brand of charlatanism? No, no. I am with Shepard Smith, here.
"I feel like a televangelist," enthuses Beck. How dare you sully the good name of televangelists!
[WATCH, I GUESS.]
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