This story on Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally made it all the way to paragraph 6 before laying on the sort of tone you’d expect from The Washington Post:

On the Mall, an overwhelmingly white crowd of tens of thousands stood quietly during an opening prayer, the silence broken only by an occasional “amen.” The dense assembly , which contained few young people, stretched from the Lincoln Memorial, past the reflecting pool, to the World War II Memorial and spilled onto the grounds of the Washington Monument.

The crowd, consisting of many from the Midwest and the South, was not visibly angry. Rather, they said they had come to express their fear that the country was at a perilous moment.

Emphasis mine. The crowd’s not primarily or predominantly white, but overwhelmingly so. And the hillbillies aren’t visibly angry – should we expect them to be? – but they are afraid. This endless focus on the race and fear of Tea Party types represents a naked attempt by the “mainstream” media to paint anyone who agrees with Beck, Palin, et al. as a bigoted yokel. It also helps explain why Beck and other Fox News programming generally pulls more viewers than the three top competitors combined.

I’m a News Corp. shareholder, but I watch almost no TV news because I tire quickly of all the networks’ theatrics. For millions of Americans, however, Fox News provides a distinct option in a sea of leftward slanted reporting. That the other fish use every opportunity to whine about the racism and ignorance of anyone who disagrees with them reflects poorly on somebody… and that “somebody” is not Glenn Beck. Charles Krauthammer sums it up perfectly.

As for concerns about Beck co-opting the time and place of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, these seem completely misplaced. Red or yellow, black or white, it’d be difficult to find worse representatives of King’s dream than the professional victims who get away with acting in his name simply because of the color of their skin. I’ll take a speech about what makes America great over a speech about how much we owe the Al Sharptons of the world any day, even if the audience is “overwhelmingly white.”

Media coverage of Israel’s refusal to let a stunt backed by Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood break its blockade of Gaza is standard fare, when you consider that most news outlets employ people who hate Israel. Take, for instance, an AP story today about another “aid” ship seized by Israel, “Israel remains defiant, seizes Gaza-bound aid ship:”

A defiant Israel enforced its 3-year-old blockade of Hamas-ruled Gaza on Saturday, with naval commandos swiftly commandeering a Gaza-bound aid vessel carrying an Irish Nobel laureate and other activists and forcing it to head to an Israeli port instead.

The bloodless takeover stood in marked contrast to a deadly raid of another Gaza aid ship this week. However, it was unlikely to halt snowballing international outrage and demands that Israel lift or at least loosen the devastating closure that confines 1.5 million Palestinians to a small sliver of land and only allows in basic humanitarian goods.

Israel’s blockade is the only defense of a nation beset on all sides by enemies who want to push them into the sea. Wouldn’t it be more intuitive to label the continued “aid vessel” traffic as “defiant,” instead of the Israeli government? Hamas - the elected governing party of Gaza – is dedicated to Israel’s destruction. The useful idiots crying about Israel’s blockade have no excuse save ignorance for siding with genocidal maniacs, but they do so proudly.

As for those truly suffering in Gaza – how is it that Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Hamas escape blame? Why is Israel the only nation demonized for the suffering of people used as pawns in an ongoing effort to destroy the Jewish state? To read the Associated Press take on the situation, you’d think enforcing a blockade was worse than regularly launching rockets at Israeli civilians. Don’t worry, the AP mentions that pesky “rockets and mortars” issue… in paragraph 28.

Charles Krauthammer’s weekend article at National Review provides invaluable context. A highlight that I found more than a little shocking:

Oh, but weren’t the Gaza-bound ships on a mission of humanitarian relief? No. Otherwise they would have accepted Israel’s offer to bring their supplies to an Israeli port, be inspected for military materiel, and have the rest trucked by Israel into Gaza – as every week 10,000 tons of food, medicine, and other humanitarian supplies are sent by Israel to Gaza.

The plight of Gaza’s people can be blamed on many parties. Israel may be on the list, but they’re definitely not at the top. Nonetheless, the Associated Press continues reporting as if Israel is the root cause of every problem in the Middle East. Who will clueless Westerners blame if Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran (but I repeat myself) have their way?

Political Editor Mark Preston peeked out of President Obama’s pocket early this morning to post a side-busting election results story on CNN.com – “Analysis: Elections not a referendum on Obama.” It doesn’t matter, you see, that Republicans Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell won governorships in New Jersey and Virginia, respectively. It also doesn’t matter that Christie got the support of 60% of Independents, while McDonnell received 66% of the Independent vote – numbers that, since CNN seems to have forgotten, are what you’d call “a landslide.”

Naturally CNN knows what went wrong for Democrats Corzine and Deeds:

Neither Democratic candidate was Obama; neither was a great spokesman for “change;” and Democratic strategists and grassroots activists said each candidate failed to give independents a reason to support them.

I honestly laughed out loud at this sentence. When President Obama was elected amid circumstances that would have challenged a party far more competent than the GOP of 2008, CNN pundits could scarce contain their delight. A new era! A monumental shift towards the sort of government-first, government last, and government in the middle country that CNN wishes we had! Now the network would rather wax nostalgic on 2008 than consider that maybe Americans are smarter than that. My hope is that Krauthammer’s right, because the alternative would be mighty depressing.

Still, in the coming days a storyline will develop that this was a referendum on Obama and his policies.

But not if CNN’s crack reporting staff has anything to say about it. Back to the important angle: partisan strife in the GOP!

At the same time, another narrative will continue to evolve over the future of the Republican Party as grassroots conservative activists seek to increase their influence following the success of forcing the centrist Republican nominee in a New York congressional special election from the race.

No one outside of Manhattan, Chicago, or San Francisco would call Dede Scozzafava a “centrist Republican.” No one. CNN’s continued flagrant bias, combined with their winking assertion that they possess none, can only guide them downward into irrelevance (while helping the stock of a certain evil non-news network I’m happy to own).