I don't think I've ever watched a more enjoyable hour with Beck in all my years blogging. I have to hand it to a somewhat unbalanced Eric Massa. I was deeply concerned about him, based on the changing stories and what appeared to be angry lashing out at the White House. But Beck saw that and thought, "Jackpot!", betting his entire hour that Massa would give him the ammunition he needed to once more condemn the Maoists/Communists/Fascists/evil-doers (pick your ism) in the White House.

Talk about rolling craps.

While Beck shook his head in disbelief and repeatedly demanded in his best McCarthyite gravitas for Massa to name names, Massa refused to give the payout he was looking for. Massa admitted guilt, took responsibility and repeatedly said that the best thing for people to do was to participate in the electoral process and try to bring around campaign finance reform. Time:

Massa had come on Fox to out-Beck Glenn Beck. Armed with the very same weapons — a deep sense of victimhood, outrage at the powers that be and remarkable personal candor — the Representative delivered a dizzying confessional. [..]

Beck, who is used to controlling the gravitational force of victimhood around him, kept interrupting to point out that he was a bigger target of even greater forces than Massa. "I have two unauthorized biographies coming out against me in the spring," Beck said at one point. Minutes later, Beck went even further. "Do you realize my family is at stake?" he said. "You've got a little scandal with your children in college. I've got one for all time now, because I am not going to resign. I'm not going to back down. I have come to a place where I believe at some point the system will destroy me."

But Beck could not compete with the oddity of the sympathy card Massa kept pulling. He appeared frustrated that Massa wasn't revealing any more sinister plots afoot in the nation's capital, and he got visibly annoyed when Massa tried to take some measure of responsibility for his actions and attempted to walk back some of his more heated rhetoric against White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.

And to make things worse, when Massa turned from discussing his own woes to the machinations of Washington, he offered ideas that have no place in Fox News's tightly regulated framework. Massa suggested that Beck and other Americans demand "campaign finance reform" to curb the corruption on Capitol Hill. Beck, who has called such proposals a "huge mistake," put his hand over his mouth, as if he were holding back an upset stomach. Massa, who has opposed Obama's health reform because it is not liberal enough, told Beck that he should stop calling people names like "socialist" and "communist." "You can be a progressive and be a fiscal conservative," Massa then explained, as Beck lost control of his own program.

I can't tell you how tickled I was watching Beck get more and more deflated as the hour went on, finally resulting in apologizing to his audience for wasting their time. And it was laughable when he turned the interview into a chance to promote his own victim hood while never mentioning that Beck made 23 million dollars last year.

Beck: "I believe at some point the system will destroy me."

Looks like the system is being kind to the man who describes himself as a Rodeo clown, wouldn't you say?

The sad part is that Beck DID waste his viewers' time, but not in the way that he thought. He was so blinded by his hatred of the administration, so focused on his witch hunts that he completely missed that he had an exclusive interview with a former congressperson who resigned due to a litany of ever changing reasons and his inability to get past the all-encompassing need to raise money as a politician and his frustration with campaign financing. The rest of the media will focus on the salacious details of his ethics investigation and miss it too.

But Massa is 100% right. The best way to end corruption in DC is campaign finance reform, and that's an area that all of us, from the nuttiest tea-bagger to the dirtiest liberal hippie can support. But Beck didn't want to hear about real problems or real ways to make things better in this country.