Obituary for NPR?

I'm sick of the right wing media machine getting to determine whether liberals are in trouble. What a little relay race of subterfuge: the notorious scumbag James O'Keefe runs his little bad theatre scam to entrap some institution beloved on the left--NPR or Acorn or whatever--into saying something which can be used as an example of unsavory leftism (would that the bar were not so low), and Murdoch's boys take whatever he throws out and runs with it. That's standard wingnut practice. But then, as if on cue, the rest of the media trots along and covers the whole business as though it were news, as if it wasn't from the outset a concerted attempt to control the narrative.

Fuck that whole Rube Goldberg noise machine. Ron Schiller said that the Republican Party has been overrun by anti-intellectual and racist Tea-Baggers. Shocking! What's next, that the Earth is spherical? Every single on-air personality of Faux News and Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman and the hallucinating Glenn Beck all say things 100 times as outrageous and inflammatory as this tepid remark every single day and if they're challenged about their views they reiterate them and even double down. Obama is a Communist! Obama is not an American! Health care is Nazi! Liberals hate families! If NPR had embraced anything even remotely analogous to these they would have had to board the place up. But nobody's boarding up Faux: Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes are multi-millionaires. Murdoch is one of the richest people on the planet.

Fighting fire with fire in this case only plays to the packed anti-rational gallery. But we certainly won't fight the fire by helping those on the right fan the flames. There are already so few institutional places left which have not been polluted by Rupert Murdoch's relentless rightward shifting of the nation's Overton Window, and it pains me to see NPR cower to this intellectual terrorism. This tactic only works because we let it.

Let this be a wakeup call to NPR: stop being led around by your nose ring. If an executive calling Tea-Baggers idiots and racists off the record--which is after all no more than the straight truth--is grounds for the top brass to resign then I begin to wonder what I'm supporting. What's next? NPR apologizing for its coverage of evolution? Or global warming? I've already abandoned television for being almost universally incapable of telling a straight story. I will mourn the loss of NPR if conservatives manage to pollute this last broadcast stronghold.

Talking With a Dining Room Table

Teddy Bear kicks some Tea-Baggin' ass!

More Fun With The Tea-Baggers!

The Tea-Bagger Stupidity Express continues to stuff America into a clown suit.

First we have Christine "Hoover-Head" O'Donnell showing why we don't let kids handle power tools as she claims that there is no Constitutional separation between church and state. "Where in the Constitution is separation of church and state?" O'Donnell asked her Democratic opponent Chris Coons in a debate, while the audience gasped audibly. When Coons answered her question, she claimed he didn't understand the Constitution. (I'll bet $50 that response was energizing to many of her base.)

And guess who's doubling down on the stupendous stupid? None other than the Great Human Flatulence, Rush Limbaugh. Both of them are now on record opposing maybe the single most important innovation in our Constitution.

Then, not to be outdone in promoting the New Conservative Dark Age, Sarah Palin puts all her weight behind a Senatorial candidate... from the wrong state! Oh well, geography is just for pointy-headed progressives!

With liberals trying to destroy the Constitution, thank goodness we have knowledgeable conservatives like O'Donnell and Palin trying to save the world before it's too late!

Keep Your Government Hands Off My Medicare!

The Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi has written an exposé of the Tea-Baggers for the upcoming issue. The article is available now online. Taibbi spent a year attending meetings and rallies and interviewing Tea-Baggers, trying to take the pulse of the movement.

No surprise: the close-up view is not flattering (not that the long view threatened to enchant). The article is brilliant and very worth 20 minutes of your time. Here are some samples (chosen from four pages of zingers):

It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists. They're completely blind to how offensive the very nature of their rhetoric is to the rest of the country. I'm an ordinary middle-aged guy who pays taxes and lives in the suburbs with his wife and dog — and I'm a radical communist? I don't love my country? I'm a redcoat? Fuck you! These are the kinds of thoughts that go through your head as you listen to Tea Partiers expound at awesome length upon their cultural victimhood, surrounded as they are by America-haters like you and me or, in the case of foreign-born president Barack Obama, people who are literally not Americans in the way they are.

It's not like the Tea Partiers hate black people. It's just that they're shockingly willing to believe the appalling horseshit fantasy about how white people in the age of Obama are some kind of oppressed minority...

As an example of the Tea-Bagger saga, Taibbi writes about the campaign and primary victory of Rand Paul. Talking of Paul's defection from his early Libertarian principles into the arms of the mainstream Republican power structure, a defection which alienated some of Paul's young adherents, Taibbi writes:

...it isn't young intellectuals... who will usher Paul into the U.S. Senate in the general election; it's those huge crowds of pissed-off old people who dig Sarah Palin and Fox News and call themselves Tea Partiers. And those people really don't pay attention to specifics too much. Like dogs, they listen to tone of voice and emotional attitude...

The Tea Party is many things at once, but one way or another, it almost always comes back to a campaign against that unsafe urban hellscape of godless liberalism we call our modern world. Paul's platform is ultimately about turning back the clock, returning America to the moment of her constitutional creation, when the federal bureaucracy was nonexistent and men were free to roam the Midwestern plains strip-mining coal and erecting office buildings without wheelchair access.

Talking about Rand Paul's foot-in-mouth assertion that restaurants should have the right to refuse to serve blacks:

It's no use explaining that while nobody likes the idea of having to get the government to tell restaurant owners how to act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the tool Americans were forced to use to end a monstrous system of apartheid that for 100 years was the shame of the entire Western world. But all that history is not real to Tea Partiers; what's real to them is the implication in your question that they're racists, and to them that is the outrage, and it's an outrage that binds them together.

Read the whole article here.

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Addendum:

It's energizing to finally read some intelligent push back to all this right wing lunacy. After the above piece I ran across another brutally frank piece by Steven Thrasher in The Village Voice. And judging by the comments, plenty of people are unhappy with it.

A Letter To AT&T

To Whom It May Concern:

My wife and I are longtime AT&T customers, having a wireless account with two iPhones plus Uverse television and broadband internet. We also have AT&T local phone service at our home. We have been generally pleased with these products and the service we've received both online and at our local AT&T stores. I travel the world for a living, and my iPhone has become an indispensable tool for me.

However, I was mortified to learn today that AT&T ranks as the number one corporate donor to the political campaigns of the nascent "Tea Party" candidates. I find this news distressing and frankly unacceptable.

I understand that corporate monetary influence of political campaigns is a fact of our political landscape (though an unfortunate one, I think). And while I understand that political conservatism in this country tends to be friendlier to business concerns in matters of taxation and regulation, the Tea Party represents an extremity of political thought that makes corporate contributions surely inappropriate. At the least, the Tea Party is inarguably distasteful to a large segment of AT&T's millions of customers. Good corporate citizenship surely means something more than the ruthless pursuit of policies to maximize profits to the exclusion of any other considerations.

Surely what is appropriate here--and what I request of you--is for the company to support candidates who represent a broad range of political thought reflective of AT&T's customer base.

My horror of the Tea Party and my sense of integrity and social responsibility compel me to distance myself from any organization giving substantial support to the movement, and to make every effort to ensure that no dollars of mine could possibly benefit a movement which I feel is damaging my country.

To this end, I'm inclined to immediately cancel all my AT&T accounts. However, your affiliation with Apple and its iPhone represents a roadblock to my intentions. Because no other domestic wireless provider carries the iPhone, and no manufacturer has yet produced a device to match the iPhone's capabilities, the necessity of giving up the iPhone in order to divest myself from AT&T is a step I am at present unwilling to make. But barring a change in AT&T's policies, I will switch cell phone carriers the moment another company can support the iPhone, and in the meantime I will look at finding a different provider of internet and television services.

I would appreciate a reply and, if my information is incorrect, an explanation of how this is so.

Sincerely,

etc., etc.