Glenn Beck On 9/11 Event Frenzy: ‘I Am Not Ashamed Of Making Money’

Glenn Beck had quite a vacation. It started with the Pakistani ambassador interrupting Beck’s fly-fishing to ask him to condemn the Koran-burning and ended with a media frenzy over his 9/11 event with Sarah Palin.

Regarding the former, Beck thinks the pastor is an idiot. Regarding the latter, well Beck had plenty to say on that including that the media appears to be engaged in reporting what he calls “future news” — truth be told, a pretty nifty sum-up of what’s been going on this last week. Mostly, however, Beck was enraged by how the media chose to frame his appearance on 9/11 with Sarah Palin (he included my headline among those he was not happy with, though apparently did not read the full post).

Here’s how the appearance went down according to Beck. He was hired to make a speech (a fairly normal occurrence), Palin called him to ask if she could introduce him, he said yes. A few days later Palin Facebooked about it and the media blew it into a big controversy. Subsequently, Beck’s PR company announced that Beck was intending to donate the money, something which apparently angered Beck because even though it was always his intention to do such it’s actually nobody’s business how he spends the money he earns. And by the way this is America and the whole free market system is about to collapse because people are not being allowed to go out and make money.

All of which makes sense. And Beck is right to say he is not ashamed to make money, though considering his preoccupation with dates in the past I think it’s, shall we say, naive on his part to think people wouldn’t assume this was the latest ‘date’ event. Anyway, here’s what I bet happened. Beck got hired to do the speech, as he says. Palin asked to be included. Up until that point, to the best of my knowledge, the event had not been heavily promoted either on Beck’s site or his show, which is notable considering how heavily he has pushed other events in the past. It wasn’t until Palin Facebooked the event that things got hairy, mostly because of how she framed it: “I can think of no better way to commemorate 9/11 than to gather with patriots who will “never forget.”” That was the line that lit the media firestorm that Beck was eventually forced to put out. Basically Sarah Palin went rogue on Beck’s PR team is what it sounds like to me.

You can watch Beck’s long rant about all things media below.