First Principles

I used to listen to NPR all the time.  My dad listened to it all the time when I was a kid, from the time his clock radio went off in the morning to whenever Prairie Home Companion finished.  When I was in high school, I had a 45 minute drive to school.  I listened to it with my dad during breakfast, and I only switched it in my car when it had more or less cycled through the entire show.

I kept that loyal listenership all through my time in the Navy.  I was getting more conservative, and NPR more liberal, but it was a good mental workout to listen to something I didn’t always agree with.

And then came 9/11, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The news turned more and more to military matters, which I had plenty of personal experience with.  And the more they talked about things I was already familiar with, the more apparent their ignorance, bias, agenda, and full on anti-Americanism came into focus.

Bored and disgusted, and seeking respite from the monolithically liberal Pacific Northwest, I started listening to conservative talk radio.  I’d always avoided it in the past based on the stereotypical “dumb shouting” that I always assumed it was, but found it to be far more astute, probing, open minded, and informative than NPR.  It turns out that slow, deliberative, and carefully enunciated speech patterns don’t necessarily equal intelligence after all…  It makes a good mask, though.

I still clicked back over to it, partly since by then I was in law school, and walking a lot more places with an MP3 player instead of my car’s radio.  That meant I could only listen to FM.  So, still loving talk radio and an intellectual challenge I’d check in from time to time.  Every time, it was increasingly disturbing.

One “news” story about the horrors of George Bush’s War On Innocents told the tale of a young, idealistic and naive young man who in 2000, left his family to go study and worship God in Afghanistan.  After 9/11, he was just a victim of place and time, don’t you see, which is how he found himself captured on a battlefield and detained by the US.  The idea that they tried to make a guy into a victim, this terrorist who made a conscious decision to embrace the worst sort of murderous Islamic fascist militarism, and then engaged in that practice for years, made my stomach turn.  I’m sure I sounded like a crazy man shouting back at the sounds coming from my headphones as I was walking to my car.

But the last straw was when I clicked over and heard Daniel Shorr decrying the Bush Administration for declaring Hamas a terrorist organization.  To Shorr, the fact that Hamas on occasion doled out scraps of food and a few band-aides to Palestinians overshadowed their legacy of cold blooded murder.

That was in 2006.  I never listened again.

Shorr later opined that America disregarded innocent life, as offensive (and incorrect) a personal opinion as could possibly be imagined.  What was his title at the time?  “Senior News Analyst.”

That’s the same title (without the “senior”) that NPR now claims required the firing of Juan Williams for violating “journalistic standards”  for admitting people on airplanes in “Muslim garb” made him nervous.

Whatever you think of what Williams said, was it really as bad as the spirited defense of an organization dedicated to genocide?

The fact that any fraction of a single cent of my tax dollars goes to NPR offends me to my core.  It should every other American, too.  I only hope this finally leads to the very necessary government de-funding of subsidized left wing radio.

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On a related note, I saw this quote from one of NPR’s “senior vice presidents” which reflects the bizarre ignorance of the folks running the place.

Rehm said it was inappropriate for politicians to interject the issue of federal funding into an editorial decision, adding that she hoped the controversy would not affect financial support for public radio.

Politicians elected with the Constitutional responsibility to decide how tax revenue is spent shouldn’t be talking about how and on what tax dollars should be spent?  Wha?

You take the king’s money, you play by the king’s rules.  If you don’t like your benefactor interjecting on your editorial decisions, divorce yourself from the taxpayer’s wallet and make it on your own, if you can.  You don’t get to be free and independent while relying on the government for your very existence.  You like big, intrusive government?  Welcome to the downsides of your voluntary abandonment of your God given gift of liberty.  Maybe now these leftists will understand our objection to Obamacare…

Sorry, I know.  But it was a nice thought for a second.