A man who appears to be a National Public Radio senior executive, Ron Schiller, has been captured on camera savaging conservatives and the Tea Party movement.
“The current Republican Party, particularly the Tea Party, is fanatically involved in people’s personal lives and very fundamental Christian – I wouldn’t even call it Christian. It’s this weird evangelical kind of move,” declared Schiller, who runs NPR’s foundation.
In a new video released Tuesday morning by conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe, Schiller and Betsy Liley, NPR’s director of institutional giving, are seen meeting with two men who, unbeknownst to the NPR executives, are posing as members of a Muslim Brotherhood front group. The men, who identified themselves as Ibrahim Kasaam and Amir Malik from the fictitious Muslim Education Action Center (MEAC) Trust, met with Schiller and Liley at Café Milano, a well-known Georgetown restaurant, and explained their desire to give to $5 million to NPR because, “the Zionist coverage is quite substantial elsewhere.” ...
Schiller goes on to describe liberals as more intelligent and informed than conservatives. “In my personal opinion, liberals today might be more educated, fair and balanced than conservatives,” he said.
Even if the NPR executive's caricature of the right is accurate, you have to love it that he thinks that religious zealots who want to reduce the deficit are worse than religious zealots that want to impose Sharia law and bolster jihadis.
If you haven't actually listened to NPR, this might surprise you. I've long said it is a shame that "liberal minded" is a synonym for "open minded." I've certainly known open-minded liberals (and close-minded conservatives), but I've also seen quite a lot of very close-minded people on the left who only believe they are open minded because they are liberal minded and think the two are the same.
And you wonder why I sometimes despair at the ability of our press corps to cover military and war issues? They're so tilted and unaware of the basics that they usually don't even know that there are things they don't know.
UPDATE: Juan Williams recognizes the closed world of NPR:
I’m just saying, you listen to this guy and the way everybody who has a non-liberal orthodox point of view is somehow a bad person and you see, you know what these are people who are anti-intellectuals. They do not want to hear and engage in an honest debate.”
Like I said, "liberal minded" is not the same as "open minded."
UPDATE: And while I'm at it, I always hated NPR's fundraising appeals. They actually had the nerve to claim that listeners came to value their balanced no-agenda, reporting on important issues without screaming and incivility. I think they actually believed that load of bull! Look, speaking in a dull, monotone that sedates listeners into believing that handing over their credit card number to a waiting volunteer in exchange for yet another freaking tote bag is a great idea is not the same as being balanced! They can--and did all the time--provide biased coverage (or non-coverage decisions, which is part of the bias) while sounding like they had a pole shoved up their nether regions, giving them that distinctive oh-so-serious voice of apparent serious reasonableness. It was all liberal things considered, and they had no idea that they were quite biased. Not that they couldn't have some good reports, but pretending they are uniquely reasonable just annoyed me to no end over the years.
There. I feel better now. Sometimes I just have to up the rant-to-dignified ratio.
UPDATE: Cue the idiots. "Liberal minded" pretty much defined.
