[cross posted at NPR Check]
Part I - School Daze

Mara Liasson - on Tuesday (September 8, 2009) ATC, tries to normalize the wingnut stupidity, insanity and virulence of the Republican-led attacks on Obama's live address to schools. Of his speech she says,

"Inspiring perhaps, but not very controversial. And not unlike the politically innocuous study hard, stay in school messages of previous presidents. Of course, those messages were subject to political sniping as well. Back in 1991, when George H. W. Bush gave a similar speech, Democrats called it political advertising."

Even though the chairman of the Florida Republican party stated that "I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama's socialist ideology....schoolchildren across our nation will be forced to watch the president justify his plans....an invasive abuse of power" - Liasson equates this rabidly stupid, hypocritical attack with the "political sniping" of Democrats who denounced Bush 41's school speech as "paid political advertising" and investigated the use of federal funds in producing the broadcast.

Part II - You Lie

Inskeep on September 10, 2009 ME weighs in on Rep. Joe Wilson's unprecedented interruption of Pres. Obama's joint session speech the evening before:

"Now, in the middle of that booing, you can hear Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina shout out, 'You lie!' There's been a lot of the coverage of the etiquette of this. Wilson has apologized, but let's ask about the substance. Was the president truthful in saying that his plan is not going to cover illegal immigrants?"

Well dang, there's a lot of reactions one might have had to Wilson's I-thought-I-was-at-a-Tea-Bag-Party outburst. Instead of questioning what role race - and decades-old Republican virulence and hypocrisy - played in Wilson's rebel yell, Inskeep wants to get to the "substance" of his squeal. At least if NPR was going to focus on the "substance" - it might have focused on the depravity of our political culture in general - where a supposedly liberal President is heckled for not being anti-undocumented immigrant enough when he is defending how hard-hearted he wants his healthcare reform bill to be toward those undocumented immigrants.

Blue Texan at FDL really captures the role that Liasson, Inskeep and NPR are playing: the American Right flings the most outrageous, dishonest, and ignorant poo it can and trusts that media outlets like NPR will work their hardest to shine it up as nothing but normal, mainstream, acceptable politics.