In the course of his remarkable rise from cable sideshow to Fox News superstar, Glenn Beck has never really faced a serious challenge.
To a man and woman, 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.
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 he had 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 in the Fox studios with an X-ray of his own 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.
