Not so fast says Meghan Daum in today’s Los Angeles Times:

There was something almost poignant about seeing dozens of liberal commentators extend props last week to their cardinal antagonist, Glenn Beck. Despite their religion of hating the guy, many members of the left-leaning punditocracy admitted that Beck was actually reasonable on the matter of suspected Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Pakistan who, Beck said, should be read his Miranda rights, not stripped of his civil liberties for the sake of national security.
“He’s a citizen of the United States, so I say we uphold the laws and the Constitution on citizens,” Beck said on Fox News shortly after Shahzad’s arrest. “A lot of citizens [are threats to the country]. . . . We don’t shred the Constitution when it’s popular. We do the right thing.”
What was remarkable wasn’t that Beck said this without crying on his desk but that, compared to some conservative lawmakers, he seemed downright middle of the road.
At about the same time, Sen. John McCain told radio host Don Imus that granting Shahzad his Miranda rights would be a “serious mistake . . . until we find out what it’s all about.” Sen. Joe Lieberman went even further, suggesting there should be a process under which American citizens who become involved with foreign terrorists could be easily stripped of their U.S. citizenship.
The result was that Beck looked uncharacteristically dovish in comparison.
“Credit Glenn Beck of Fox News for breaking with that sort of demagoguery and asserting that the rule of law is basic to our freedom and not just an inconvenient indulgence,” Robert Scheer wrote in an article in the Nation entitled “Glenn Beck Gets It Right.” University of Texas law professor Sandy Levinson was so sour on Lieberman that he wrote on the blog Balkanization: “I’ll take Glenn Beck . . . over the egregious junior senator from Connecticut.” Even Jon Stewart joined in on the join-hands-with-Beck fun, juxtaposing videos of a paranoid-sounding McCain and a levelheaded-sounding Beck while his audience gasped in shock.
But amusing as it has been, all of this has also somehow managed to be almost poignant rather than actually poignant – or even all that meaningful. That’s because praising Beck seems less about giving credit where it’s due than about seizing the rare opportunity to disprove certain laws of physics – like the one that says Scheer and Beck will never share even a tiny fraction of ideological space. It doesn’t rise above culture war cliches; it proves one of the biggest, that most media conservatives are too unsophisticated to grasp their own incompetence and too many media liberals’ bleeding-heart inclinations extend to grading on a curve.

The rest here.

What Daum misses, unsurprisingly, is Beck’s consistency on this point. For regular viewers and listeners, I don’t think his defense of Mirandizing Shahzad was that much of a shock.