Posted Thursday, September 02, 2010 10:00 AM | By David Weigel - Slate
With not a lot of fanfare, Glenn Beck booked Anchorage's Dena'ina for a September 11 event with no announced program. When I first heard about the event, it was from Palin-watching liberals who assumed -- correctly, it turns out -- that the former governor would attend the rally. One theory I heard was that Palin would use the event to launch a presidential bid, which I don't buy at all. Nothing suggests that she would suck the oxygen out of the GOP's midterm campaign by doing that.
Instead, I think you're going to see a sequel to Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally. Like I noted in my article on that rally, it wasn't overtly political for the same reasons that his paid speeches aren't overtly political. The people who show up for these events are already converts. The point of these events is to bolster their political anxiety by telling them they are needed to reclaim America in the name of God.
And that's how we get to the 9/11 timing. Between this event and the (fairly overblown) anti-"ground zero mosque" rally in New York, we're witnessing the end of the political truce over having rallies on 9/11. Even during the truce, however, it was assumed that 9/11 was a secular holiday for national security conservatives. Go back and read the commentary from 2004, 2006, and 2008 -- numerous people, including Newt Gingrich, suggested that the 9/11 anniversary would remind Americans that their coming electoral choice was between feckless liberals who had "forgotten" the lessons of 9/11 and strong conservatives who hadn't. Beck has been beating that drum since March 13, 2009, his famous "You Are Not Alone" episode, when he urged Americans to remember how they felt the day after 9/11. At "Restoring Honor," he didn't talk about politics. On 9/11, he won't talk about politics. But his message will be transparently political -- it's America's own fault that it handed the presidency to a liberal community organizer, because it forgot the lessons of 9/11.
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Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin plan mysterious joint appearance on 9/11
What are Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin up to? The Fox News host is headed to Alaska next week, where he's set to headline an event at Anchorage's Dena'ina Center on Sept. 11. The event went largely unnoticed until this week, when Vanity Fair offhandedly mentioned the event in a scathing profile of Palin published online Wednesday.
On his radio show Wednesday, Beck confirmed he would be going on "vacation" in Alaska and that he and Palin would appear together. But proving he is nothing if not a master at generating his own publicity, Beck played coy on other details about their joint event, which happens to fall on the ninth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. "I'm gonna give a speech up there, and Sarah's gonna give a speech, too, but that's it," Beck said.
Asked by his producer if he and Palin were "planning anything," Beck repeatedly dodged the question by pretending he couldn't hear the question. Ditto when asked if the event was "political." Here's the video, courtesy of RightScoop:
Video: Beck Is Going On Vacation
While Beck may be dodgy on what exactly he and Palin are planning, one thing is clear: The tickets are pretty pricey. According to Ticketmaster, admission ranges from $73.75 to $225 for a "meet and greet" (though it's unclear if that's just with Beck). Audience members have a choice of sitting in the "dry section" or "wet section" -- presumably a reference to booze, not the Fox host's penchant for weeping. The event comes two weeks after Beck and Palin appeared together at Beck's rally on the Mall in Washington.
(Photo of Beck and Palin in May, at Time magazine's 100-most-influential-people gala: Jemal Countess/Getty Images)
Love him or hate him, Glenn Beck is a force to be reckoned with, and a major game changer in American Politics (and so is Sarah Palin who can send the left scrambling with a single facebook post). Not since Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Harvard Commencement Speech), has any significant secular person had the guts to stand in front of America and preach what Beck preached: “American must return to God.”
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