Today the President & CEO of National Public Radio was forced to resign. That's because yesterday a hidden-camera video was released in which NPR executive Ron Schiller called the Tea Party "racist" and "xenophobic", and said that NPR might be "better off" without federal funds. Schiller resigned as well.
Staged by the same right-wing activist sleazeball who made the pimp-visits-ACORN tapes, yesterday's video resulted from an elaborate deception -- a couple of guys posing as spokesmen for some Muslim faction set up a meeting and tried repeatedly to get Schiller to take their check for $5 million. Repeatedly, he refused.
Republicans have long been convinced that public media are nothing but a liberal plot, and these days the R's are cloaking all their pet ideological desires in terms of budgetary cost-cutting necessity, so they were all over Schiller's comments like flies on shit. "Aha," cried whiny pantywaist House Whip Eric Cantor. "This proves that NPR doesn't need taxpayer money!" Holy-roller nut-job Senators Jim Demint and Tom Coburn introduced a bill to stop all funding for the mothership, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Underhanded entrapment in the guise of "journalism" doesn't sit well with me. Yeah, Scott Walker was punk'd by a lefty blogger, but that phone call was such an obvious, blatant fake, Scotty really should have figured out he was getting his crank yanked. This recent attempt at a video take-down was pretty smooth and sophisticated. We all ought to ignore this shit (but we can't).
I love NPR. I listen to it all the time. It's reliable, accurate, and much more in-depth than anything else. And I have no problem if a few of my personal sheckels are spent in support of it. So I give big props to my cousin Barry's commitment to ongoing funding for public media.
What I don't understand is why these two NPR execs fell on their swords. Because they took no money, and because the Tea Party is a bunch of for-certain, no-doubt-about-it, lead-pipe-cinch racist, xenophobic assholes. Schiller told the Truth! And I'm glad he did. More people should try it.
As for Cantor, Coburn, Demint, and the rest of the Fahrenheit 451 Club on Capitol Hill, Buster has a deficit-slashing program for you:
1. Keep your mitts off PBS, NPR, PRI, the CPB, et al.
2. Calculate precisely how many of my hard-earned tax dollars are spent on public broadcasting.
3. Now each of you douchebags cut your own fucking pay by that exact amount!
Lather, rinse, repeat. Problem solved!
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