Washington Post columnist and incoming CNN prime-time talk-show host Kathleen Parker is still auditioning for liberal-media accolades. In Wednesday's Post she offered another shovel of her frenzied distaste for prayer and G-O-D talk in public as she dismissed the Glenn Beck rally, especially the notion that Beck or Sarah Palin could blame the news media for hostility and bias. The media made these people rich, Parker insisted:
Oh, that's right, The Media. Never mind that Beck is one of the richest members of the media. Or that Palin has banked millions primarily because The Media can't get enough of her. But what's an exorcism without a demon? And who better to cast into the nether regions than the guys lugging camera lights?
That's an interesting line for someone whose assaults on Palin and other conservatives made her a millionaire CNN host.
But conservatives have never focused their media-bias complaints on "guys lugging camera lights," but the people who adore Obama and other liberals in front of the cameras. Parker also made her usual female-version-of-Scarborough complaints about how poor Barack Obama is the subject of juiced-up right-wing paranoia and conspiracy theories about his aggressive aggrandizement of government action:
And the darkness? Creeping communism brought to us by President you-know-who. Conspiracy theories and paranoia are not unfamiliar to those who have wrestled the demon alcohol.
Like other successful revivalists -- and giving the devil his due -- Beck is right about many things. Tens of thousands joined him in Washington and watch him each night on television for a reason. But he also is messianic and betrays the grandiosity of the addict.
Let's hope Glenn gets well soon.
Don Surber ably put Parker in her place, that place where her talk-show partner Eliot Spitzer had demons of his own:
Ridiculing his alcoholism after agreeing to appear nightly on an hourlong show electronically beside a man whose sexual addiction and proclivities cost him his job as governor of New York is humorously ironic. Instead of picking at Beck’s speck, she might try dislodging that log in her broadcasting partner’s eye.