Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Faking the Outrage at NPR

The Right have gotten a lot of practice in on this recently. They started with Juan Williams' firing and continued their feeding frenzy today with Ronald Schiller's firing. Kill their funding!!! Not a penny!!!

But there's just so much hypocrisy in all of it.

Take Mr. Williams. He got fired for expressing his bigotry towards Muslims. He sees them in airports, and oooooooh, Muslims, scary!!!!! From all the right wing furor, it's apparently perfectly OK to be a bigot where Muslims are concerned, laudable even. It got Williams a big contract and a raise.

Mr. Schiller got fired due to a "gotcha!" hidden camera video where he is caught expressing his prejudices against Tea Party members as bigots and xenophobes. True, he paints with an over-broad brush, but the Tea Party certainly does contain a hefty proportion of them in its ranks, much as it's politically uncomfortable for the right to actually admit it in public. So even with more truth backing his prejudices, it's much worse to be a bigot against radical right-wingers than Muslims.

The right wing is screaming about Schiller doing the same thing they applauded Williams for months earlier. So it's apparently not how bigoted or truthful or outspoken your opinions are, it's all in whom you have them towards. It would be funny and ironic if they weren't so self-important and self-serious that they couldn't get the point. But apparently they can't. Or won't.

Stand up straight, NPR. Firing both these particular jerks was justified. Take a deep breath and move on. You're the best radio, and the best news, out there. (Just remind everybody that they're on Candid Camera all the time, know it or not. The world has changed.)

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