A REFRESHING SPIN ON CABLE TV
It�s good to have someone arguing life would be better if government left us alone


Few of us had heard of Glenn Beck a few years ago. Now the conservative talk-jock is everywhere. His radio show reaches 8 million people. He�s performing live before sold-out crowds on a comedy tour. 

He�s had No. 1 best-sellers in both fiction and nonfiction � plus a new book, Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government, came out this summer.

And now he�s host of his own Fox News show, which, even though it airs in the ratings desert of late afternoon, has a bigger audience than every show on the other cable news channels.

Why is he so popular? Beck says it�s because he really believes what he says. I don�t buy that. Rachel Maddow and Lou Dobbs believe what they say, but their audience is a fraction of Beck�s. I hope he�s popular because of what he says, like: �Both parties only believe in the power of the party�; �if we get out of people�s way, the sky�s the limit�; and the answers to our problems �never come from Washington.� 

Much of the mainstream media despises Beck. �The Daily Show�s� Jon Stewart quipped, �Finally, a guy who says what people who aren�t thinking are thinking.� MSNBC�s Keith Olbermann has repeatedly named Beck �worst person in the world,� and one of his MSNBC colleagues compared his TV show to watching a �car accident.� On �The View,� Whoopi Goldberg called him �a lying sack of dog mess.�

Some critics dislike Beck because they consider him a Republican lapdog, but he attacks both parties. He criticized the Bush administration�s spending and bailout of AIG. He says that politicians from both parties are �lying to the people that they�re supposed to serve,� �flushing our country down the toilet for power� and ignoring the Constitution. 

He points to the takeovers of General Motors and AIG as examples of government grabbing power it doesn�t legitimately have. �We�re giving our freedoms away,� Beck says. �The American experiment was about freedom. Freedom to be stupid, freedom to fail, freedom to succeed.� 

Though Beck is a success now, he struggled for years with serious personal problems. His parents divorced when he was a teenager. �My mother was an alcoholic and a drug addict,� he told me when I interviewed him for a �20/20� profile. She later committed suicide. 

�When I hit 30, I was going down that same path. I tried for almost two years to stop drinking. I was a jerk. I fired a guy one time for bringing me the wrong kind of pen,� he shared.

Yet, Beck says, �I�d look myself in the mirror every day, and say, �You�re not an alcoholic. You don�t have a problem.�

�One morning,� he says, �my kids came down for breakfast, and they said, �Dad, tell us the story of Inky, Blinky and Stinky and the Island of Cheese.� And I realized that not only could I not remember the story I told them, I didn�t even remember tucking them in. So I said, �You see how much you remember. You tell me what was the story.� 

That night he went to Alcoholics Anonymous. Not long after, he became a Mormon. I asked him why.

�I apologize, but guys will understand this. My wife is, like, hot, and she wouldn�t have sex with me until we got married. And she wouldn�t marry me unless we had a religion.�

I asked Tania Beck about that. She laughed, saying, �He�s not joking.�

Now Beck says that Mormonism has grounded him, so he�s grateful to his wife. 

Whatever grounded him, I�m glad something did. Because it�s good to have a super-successful cable-TV host arguing that life would be better if government � Democrats and Republicans � just left Americans alone.

�We should reject big government and look inside ourselves for all the things that built this country into what it was,� Beck says.