Amanpour Offers Bitter-Clinger Variation To Explain Beck Rally Success

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Christiane Amanpour just sealed her victory as recipient of my Obama Parrot of the Week Award . .  

That's the dubious prize I give out to on my local TV show to the media member most ardently echoing the Obama party line.  The moderator of This Week sewed up the win with her remarks on GMA this morning, as she sought to explain the big turnout at Glenn Beck's rally yesterday.

Readers will recall that at that ritzy fund-raiser in San Francisco, candidate Obama explained the attitudes of poor rural Pennsylvanians in terms of "bitter" people who "cling" to their religion and values.  Check out Amanpour's analysis of those attending the Beck rally and other similar events, and see if it doesn't sound eerily similar.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR:  Most of the speeches, which were about religion, about God, about the title of the march, which was Restoring Honor, which meant about the military, and every time that the speakers spoke about members of the military at war in Iraq and Afghanistan there were huge cheers. And 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 it 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.

Sounds like Amanpour sees religion and patriotism as . . . the opiate of the masses.