The Massa Circus Takes the Air out of Glenn Beck
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http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1970982,00.html#ixzz0hodM8we8n the course of his remarkable rise from cable sideshow to Fox News superstar, Glenn Beck has never really faced a serious challenge.
To both men and women, his opponents only made him stronger, strengthening his every-guy-against-the-world image and putting some meat on the bones of his near paranoid ravings about dark forces aligning against liberty, and himself. When cornered, he only became more vulnerable, more tearful and, at least to his fervent followers, more likable.
(See pictures from a day in the life of Glenn Beck.)
But on Tuesday night, Beck faced a foe unlike any other, a pasty, disgraced former one-term Democratic Congressman from New York, Eric Massa, who had resigned only hours earlier amid an ethics inquiry into allegations that he groped and sexually harassed some of his male employees over the years. Massa, who has maintained that his main reason for not running for re-election in the fall is a recurrence of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, arrived at the Fox studios with an X-ray of his chest and a photo album of pictures from his Navy service that, he announced, "looks like an orgy in Caligula." "I'm going to show you a lot more than tickle fights," Massa told Beck, leaving the host, for a precious moment, speechless.
Massa had come on Fox to out-Beck Glenn Beck. Armed with the very same weapons — a deep sense of victimhood, outrage at the powers that be and remarkable personal candor — the Representative delivered a dizzying confessional. He admitted to sexless groping and tickling of his staff, sending inappropriate text messages and otherwise failing to behave like a Congressman should, all as he made his case that his fellow Democrats had really gone after him because of his previous no vote on health care reform. "I can't fight this. I can't fight cancer," Massa announced, in a classic stream-of-consciousness ramble. "I can't fight the White House. I can't fight the Democratic Party."
(See TIME's cover story "Mad Man: Is Glenn Beck Bad for America?")
Beck, who is used to controlling the gravitational force of victimhood around him, kept interrupting to point out that he was a bigger target of even greater forces than Massa. "I have two unauthorized biographies coming out against me in the spring," Beck said at one point. Minutes later, Beck went even further. "Do you realize my family is at stake?" he said. "You've got a little scandal with your children in college. I've got one for all time now, because I am not going to resign. I'm not going to back down. I have come to a place where I believe at some point the system will destroy me."
But Beck could not compete with the oddity of the sympathy card Massa kept pulling. He appeared frustrated that Massa wasn't revealing any more sinister plots afoot in the nation's capital, and he got visibly annoyed when Massa tried to take some measure of responsibility for his actions and attempted to walk back some of his more heated rhetoric against White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.
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http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1970982,00.html#ixzz0hodpFxjB