I’ve not been a fan of Beck’s. (Rather the opposite, in fact, while conceding that he is at least a very talented demagogue.) But there was something refreshing in his fundamental message, to wit, We have seen the enemy, and it is us. Or at least, Not just us.

Using a personal trope—Beck is recovering alcoholic—he likened the Republican Party’s big-spending habit to the appetite of a drinker who can’t stop himself. He also indulged in a daring bit of palimpsest, rewriting one Ronald Reagan’s most memorable lines: “It is still morning in America. It just happens to be kind of a head-pounding, hungover, vomiting-for-four-hours kind of morning in America.” Not bad. Beck may not be the first repentant Republican, but he is certainly the most operatic, a kind of comic Pavarotti of the right.