Let any conservative in the media have an effect, and a counterattack will come from medial lapdogs of the left. Now the Glenn Beck has drawn political blood, he has a bulls-eye on his forehead. Poltico notices that the hyping of an alleged rivalry between Rush Limbaugh and Beck is underway, ignoring the fact that Rush has appeared on Glenn's Fox News show recently. Not exactly the behavior of someone scared of losing his dominance. Of course, the media has been demonizing Rush ever since he first succeeded in national syndication. Now they have a new game to play with Beck, and the clumsy attempt to gin up a rivalry out of whole cloth.

The left is quite properly terrified of the widespread and broad-based populist movement building in America in opposition to Obama's transformation strategy.  They never counted on this happening. Expert astroturfers themselves, they are not really familiar with the notion of a genuinely popular political movement. In their minds, a political movement needs ideological direction from above, financial support, and a network of allied groups in order to succeed. They can't deal with a movement in which leaders generate themselves spontaneously out of a deep grounding in the American founding tradition.

[Politico quoted Mark Levin, whose Liberty and Tyranny has sold one million copies. The political ramifications of this book will not sink in to intellectuals for at least a generation, but it has empowered activists, enabling them to awaken friends, neighbors, and family to the nature of the paradigm shift underway.]

Coming in the wake of CNN's studious ignoring of the ACORN tapes -- the biggest political story of the week -- this sort of attack backfires. When Jon Stewart is making fun of you, your circulation and advertising are falling off a cliff, and your cable news operation is even whipped by MSNBC, this is pathetic.