So apparently now the wingnuts want to defund NPR because it didn’t re-up the contract for a liberal. At the forefront of the “PUNISH NPR” crowd are the Huckster and Snowflake Snooki. Doug Mataconis at OTB wonders aloud:
BECAUSE SHE IS AN IDIOT. THAT’S WHY.
She is, on the other hand, at least smart enough to know that most of her supporters are just as dumb.
cleek
i’d say most of her supporters are far dumber.
JPL
One of the reasons that I admire O’Donnell is because she is willing to answer the tough questions. She might answer wrong but at least she takes a stab at it. Palin retreats to her twitter account that she has to pay someone else to handle.
blahblahblah
I’m with the wingnuts. It’s not much funding that NPR receives from the government, so lets make it none at all.
beltane
She is not only an idiot, but she and those who adore her value idiocy above all else except money. To know things, to know anything, is a form of evil to these people.
Why do conservatives worship inherited wealth while resenting inherited intelligence?
kdaug
Oh, no, Mr. Cole. You cannot deflect attention from the glorious pie-fight between E.D. and DougJ.
Nice try at “Hey, look over here!”, though.
Violet
Why does the media slavishly report every word Snowbilly Snooki says or posts? She’s nobody. I know, I know, it’s ratings. The media is particularly pathetic when it comes to her, though. They’d hump her leg if she let them.
beltane
@JPL: Palin is more of the mean girl than O’Donnell. If the half-term half-wit was subjected to the point and laugh treatment O’Donnell was at her last debate, she would probably melt into a puddle of Alaska crude.
Sly
William of Ockham approves this message.
kdaug
@beltane: Because they long for a king and resented Galileo. You misunderestimate how far back their conservationism goes.
Punchy
I just juant the Dems to win. It’s juan thing to act timid–clearly something we dislike. But to wave their Magic Juand during the elections, juan’ing the electorate to choose wisely, makes us look like juanabees.
mikefromArlington
But but…she’s just like me!!!
Napoleon
Fox gives Juan W. new 3 year $2 million dollar contract.
shortstop
One of the reasons people admire me is that I’m willing to perform neurosurgery. I might irrevocably destroy the lives of the people I work on, but instead of considering that maybe I don’t have the education, training, raw skills, patience or general temperament to be a neurosurgeon, and thus maybe I shouldn’t even be in the OR, I at least take a stab at it.
Midnight Marauder
This officially needs to be the end of shinning the spotlight on Doug Mataconis’ idiocy. There is only so much time in this world each day…
L. Trotsky's Nat'l Security State
At this point I have to conclude that Doug Mataconis is merely being trolled by FPers just to get him to show himself sn ass in the comments, again.
cyntax
@shortstop:
Awesome.
SIA
@Violet:
We have a winner.
Also, too. Titles are getting better and better around here.
shortstop
@Midnight Marauder: Especially because the poor sap is currently telling himself that this devastating takedown of Sarah P. proves–to anyone who’s been paying attention to a guy no one had heard of until yesterday–that he’s not a conservative.
JPL
@shortstop: Fortunately, I don’t vote or go to a doctor just simply because I think they are cute or tough or whatever. Sarah Palin is gutless and I stand by my statement.
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
I swear to God in heaven I commented on this post. And it is gone – much like many of my tweets from earlier in the day.
Way do you hate me, internet gods?
Whatevs, my point was: ah-HA! Now I understand the “Snowflake Snookie” reference, but I think the real Snookie would probably be a much more pleasant person to spend time with than Bible Spice. IMHO.
DBaker
The real reason why the right is upset about Juan Williams is that they have one less reason to pretend that they have the veneer of “fair and balanced” on the Fox News Sunday panel, which people watch while waiting for football.
The right has successfully managed to paint Nice Polite Republicans as “liberal” to the great unwashed. The last remaining “liberal” commentator on there is Mara Liaison and I would not be surprised if her contract with NPR is not renewed either, leaving Fortune’s ? Easton to be the “voice from the left.” Slowly but surely, Fox News has lost the ability to even use the “fair and balanced” label as the “left” has done a good job of knocking down that falsehood.
Just like with the whole money and Chamber of Commerce thing, you know you are hurting them when the wingnutosphere and talk show radio land start defending anyone remotely associated with “liberals,” or use the “nothing to see here” move along there’s no story conventional wisdom matra.
L. Trotsky's Nat'l Security State
SIA: Is that including all the raiding of the Beatles’ back catalog, too?
Brachiator
Because Sarah Palin is the Shadow President of the United States. She got 100% of the Fox News electoral votes, and has outgrown her Dr Frankenstein, semi-former almost President John McCain.
Mnemosyne
Is it bad that I really don’t give a shit that Juan Williams was fired? My employer can fire me any time they feel like it. What makes him such a special snowflake that he MUST keep his job?
kwAwk
That would make a great billboard.
Multi-purpose, also too.
Works in Alaska, Deleware, Minnesota and Nevada.
Violet
@Napoleon:
And the Wingnut University of Victimology turns out another graduate. Congratulations Juan!
Mnemosyne
@Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther:
Well, you’d probably be drinking a lot more with the real Snooki, so that might ease the pain a bit. But since she’s gone off onto public rants about how she wished John McCain had won because McCain wouldn’t have taxed her indoor tanning sessions, I think it would be a toss-up who would be more unbearable if you were sober.
FlipYrWhig
So did Ludacris lose his First Amendment rights when Bill O’Reilly got him dropped as a Pepsi pitchman?
FeFiFo
@Mnemosyne: Because when the commenting class gets fired, its a violation of their First Amendment rights and a chilling clampdown on freedom of speech. Because, y’know, once you get a cable pundit job, its your Constitutional Right to live on that soapbox til you die.
Mark S.
@Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther:
Sarah’s got your back
(I’m not sure I misspelled enough words there to be a good parody)
WTF is Juan talking about here?
Who said what in court, and why does that mean there is a Muslim war in America? I mean, Christ, W. said we aren’t at war with Islam.
Michael D.
Ahmm, I read Doug Mataconis quite a bit. I don’t think he is a Sarah Palin fan. In fact, at OTB, I would consider him the Liberal in the room.
shortstop
@JPL: Sarah Palin is gutless. Christine O’Donnell running for high office is not admirable. It really is possible for both these things to be true.
Martin
No, she’s not an idiot. She knows precisely what she’s doing.
They’re going to keep presenting the first amendment as what they want it to be, assume the media doesn’t correct them, because the media are a bunch of dickless corrupt hacks only in it for the ad impressions, the public will then assume that the wingnut impression of the first amendment is accurate because it isn’t being challenged, and then we’ll spend the next century debating the issue as we have every other fucking thing that the public’s mind has been poisoned on.
Roger Moore
@Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther:
I think the traditional thing to say is, “FYWP! Stop eating my posts!”
@Brachiator:
I think shadow cabinets are a great idea, and I’m a bit disappointed that neither party in the US has tried to do anything like setting one up. Of course it would be hard for the Republicans to do that because the point of a shadow cabinet is to provide policy proposals, and the Republicans don’t have anything beyond “whatever the Democrats hate”.
Bubblegum Tate
I think that when WordPress eats up a comment without posting it, it is depriving us of our First Amendmant rights.
Mark S.
People, Cole agreed with what Mataconis said here. It’s not a rebuttal.
Maude
@Napoleon: @Napoleon:
Juan will be for keeping the Bush Tax Cuts, espcially now.
Martin
@Napoleon: The regularity with which these assholes fail upward is infuriating.
Martin
@Roger Moore: Nah, once they get in power they’ll be back to setting up vagina border patrols. They’re not out of ideas, they’re just getting plenty of success doing nothing and getting Democrats to blame Obama for everything. Look at the gay community – Republicans filibuster DADT and now some of them are calling Obama a homophobe. They’d never buy that kind of success with policy ideas.
Ash Can
@Mark S.:
Wait, what? Huh? Was that Juan Williams? Did he really say that?
I’ve been trying to ignore this whole imbroglio as much as possible all day long in favor of doing things like cleaning the kitchen and getting piles of crap put away, thrown out, etc. But really? Is that a direct quote from Juan Williams?
OK. Between that shit and his love affair with Fox “News,” I now understand perfectly why NPR shitcanned his sorry ass, and furthermore am amazed at NPR’s forbearance for not shitcanning his sorry ass ages ago, and for not doing so in a particularly public and humiliating way.
@John:
Your righteous rants are a thing of beauty. In this case, however, I think it’s more a case of intellectual dishonesty than idiocy.
licensed to kill time
Per your suggestion on the pop up caption, I googled ‘principle of parsimony’. I did not know that was another term for Occam’s Razor. Look how smart Balloon Juice is making me! ;-)
geg6
With Mataconis, it’s simply a matter of a stopped clock and all that. What a douche.
But on the subject of the Wasilla Hillbilly, you just know that the 2012 GOP race is heating up when Politico has a lovely anonymously sourced article trailertrashing her and her clan with ugly reports from all over the nation. Won’t ever link to Politico, but Salon has a post on it, I believe. I think some of these people should be expecting to wake up one morning very soon with a grizzly head in their beds.
lamh32
@Napoleon</a
I did read that somewhere. It's an expanded contract, NOT a new show. Hell FoxNews gave the quitta from wasilla her own show, why not Juan?
I think you know what my answer to that question.
The most interesting thing about the people defending Juan Williams, is that they fall either 1)White, 2)"journalist".
Try a little scavenger hunt, find a black, non-blogger/journalist, who are actively defending Juan Williams? Go ahead, I'll wait. I'll betcha that Juan Williams' firing is being uniformly looked upon as a "bout damn time" scenario in the Black blogosphere. Why, cause the ONLY people who know who Juan Williams is, are political bloggers, and people who watch Fox News.
singfoom
Cue Doug Mataconis coming over here and saying, “Yes, because we live in a world where if someone disagrees with you, you call them an idiot.”
She is an idiot. Her supporters are even bigger idiots for not seeing her idiocy. This is not lack of civility…
This is truth.
She’s a mean girl/grifter/quitter who never should have gotten to the national stage. Thanks a lot John McCain.
Redshift
@Mark S.:
I’m too lazy to look it up, but I suspect that in the recent terrorism trials (must have missed the terrorist supervillains we were told would destroy New York, btw), some al-Qaeda criminal probably declared that they were part of a Muslim war on America.
So of course, wingnuts like Williams and O’Reilly are all too happy to help al-Qaeda by buying into it, because fearmongering for political gain is much more important than the good of the country.
lamh32
@lamh32:
BTB, TNC has a great post on Juan’s firing, and it is indicative of what the black blogosphere is saying. Ain’t none of us crying for Juan Williams
“Juan Williams Tossed From NPR
Alex S.
@JPL:
Heh, I find myself agreeing. I don’t dislike her, she’s just in the completely wrong business. Maybe she should get her own TV show. Her stint with Maher was perfect.
Citizen_X
@FeFiFo:
Well, they certainly have a Constitutional Right to be absolutely wrong about everything, for years, without their judgement or wisdom being ever questioned in a major media venue. (See: Kristol, William.)
But I guess this and the Rick Sanchez case shows you can insult people enough to get yourself fired. Being repeatedly proven to be an idiot, however, that’s fine. (See also: Rick Sanchez.)
Redshift
@lamh32: Yep. Despite what the wingnuts want to believe, the First Amendment provides protection from government censorship, not from consequences in general.
shortstop
@Ash Can: Sometimes extremely unintelligent people are quite cunning, though. She’s a purposeful manipulator and a grade-A asshole, but behind all that ego and thin skin and need for control and perfectly precise ability to push the rubes’ buttons is…an astoundingly vacuous and incurious person. She knows exactly how to read the emotional radar of her base, but her emotional IQ in terms of self-awareness and ability to play with others is extraordinarily low.
blackfrancis789
Now the Fixx is stuck in my head, except they are singing the title of this post.
Damn you Cole.
geg6
Sorry, gang. The Grifters Hit The Campaign Trail v.2010 article in Politico isn’t summarized in Salon. It’s at the WM at Benen’s place. Good for shits and giggles, which we all obviously need.
Midnight Marauder
@Michael D.:
The relevant portion of your comment has been emphasized.
Anton Sirius
@Michael D.:
That says far more about OTB than it does about Mataconis.
JPL
@shortstop: I admire her for the willingness to debate. I do not admire her for running in the first place but gotta admit that I’m glad she did.
It appears that Delaware is a safe state.
OT..It was a very narrow point that I was trying to make.. Sarah Palin doesn’t have the guts to stand up and respond to questions. She would simply say let’s talk about oil drilling.
Anton Sirius
@Mark S.:
I read it as Cole making fun of Mataconis’ “civility” in asking the question, rather than just stating the obvious.
SRW1
@Punchy:
Than juan is juan really versatile juan.
trollhattan
@Napoleon:
Cripes, when I said in the DougJ thread that this NPR canning would get him a wingnut welfare platinum card, I didn’t really mean in the same day.
Dazzling speed, even for Rupert.
Anton Sirius
@blackfrancis789:
The damn song could be the new national anthem:
The deception with tact
Just what are you trying to say?
You’ve got a blank face, which irritates
Communicate, pull out your party piece
You see dimensions in two
State your case with black or white
But when one little cross leads to shots, grit your teeth
You run for cover so discreet, why don’t they:
(Chorus)
Do what they say, say what you mean
One thing leads to another
You told me something wrong, I know I listen too long but then
One thing leads to another.
The impression that you sell
Passes in and out like a scent
But the long face that you see
Comes from living close to your fears
If this is up then I’m up but you’re running out of sight
You’ve seen your name on the walls
And when one little bump leads to shock miss a beat
You run for cover and there’s heat, why don’t they:
(Chorus)
Then it’s easy to believe
Somebody’s been lying to me
But when the wrong word goes in the right ear
I know you’ve been lying to me
It’s getting rough, off the cuff I’ve got to say enough’s enough
Bigger the harder he falls
But when the wrong antidote is like a bulge on the throat
You runs for cover in the heat why don’t they
(Chorus, repeat)
shortstop
@JPL:
Yes, I got your point, JPL; I just don’t think it’s solid. If Person A is wildly unqualified for public office and is afraid of being publicly ridiculed, and Person B is wildly unqualified for public office but is not afraid to daily make a horse’s ass of herself in front of the entire world, that doesn’t make Person B admirable or objectively superior to Person A. It makes her wildly and verbosely unqualified for office. That’s pretty much it.
Anyway, you said that O’Donnell’s willingness to talk at length (I think you’ve missed how often she attempts blatant redirection rather than just “taking a stab” and getting it wrong, but that’s somewhat beside the point) was one of the reasons you admire her. What are the others?
Ash Can
@shortstop: Oh, absolutely. What I mean is, she and right-wingers like her exhibit both idiocy and intellectual dishonesty — in spades — and sometimes it’s difficult to tell where one leaves off and the other kicks in. In this case, I get the feeling she’s being more dishonest about freedom of speech than stupid.
shortstop
@Ash Can:
SIA
@shortstop:
This is the best description of Palin I’ve ever read/heard.
cckids
@Ash Can:
What makes you think it isn’t both?
John O
I believe some of the core of John McCain’s bitterness is that he’s not quite dumb enough to fail to understand that history is going to put the blame on him for loosing this moron on the American public.
John O
@SIA:
Ditto’d.
Ailuridae
@SIA:
+1
shortstop
Wow, thanks, guys. And John O, I’ve often thought the same thing about McCain. That–and losing to the younger, smarter, more charismatic black guy–just eats away at the old goat all day long. We can only hope it also keeps him up all night.
maus
@John O: He essentially lives a life of constant shame, his stubborn ego and feelings of entitlement are what propel him forward every day,
John O
And he’s (McCain) apparently going to live the rest of his life defending his decision.
It’s a beautiful sort of Hell for him, I’m near sure. One can hope, anyway.
Calouste
It’s more that she is so dumb that she can’t grasp that anyone could possibly be smarter. She’s the posterchild for “unskilled and unaware of it”.
Svensker
@FlipYrWhig:
No, because he’s a bad Negro. Juan W. is a good Negro. Don’t you know anything?
lamh32
I think it’s funny, all the angst over Juan Williams.
The interesting thing is that his primary defenders are 1. conservatives, 2. fellow journalist.
Conservative because he was THE TOKEN Black “Liberal” guy on FOX news. If Juan Williams was on MSNBC (first of all, he probably wouldnt’ have felt comfortable enough to say the comments anyway), I bet dollars to donuts all this “concernerd conservatives” would not be so quickly defending Juan.
Journalist like Eugene Robinson, are defending Juan Williams, cause as they say, “there by the grace of God go I..”, and if not Juan, then it could be them next.
If anyone cared, they could research and see that NPR have had a laundry list of problems with Juan Williams. This incident was just the straw that broke the camels back.
Another thing, bully for Juan, he got 2 million for an extended role.
So what? Notice it’s an “extended role” but NOT HIS OWN SHOW! Which in and of itself tells you a whole hell of a lot, especially since Fox News can surely use some shall we say “diversity” in their “hosted programs”?
Also, this 2mill is a 2 headed sword now. At least with the NPR gig in his back pocket, Juan was not TOTALLY at the mercy of his Fox News overlord! Well now he has sold his soul, and Fox like their “liberals’ to follow their script. So Juan continues on in his chosen profession thanks to the “genorosity” of Fox News. And his soul will be more barren for it.
Look for Juan to either go full “Alan Combes” are to be even worse of a “Fox Liberal” than he already is.
Expect more stories or appearances involving Juan as the true evidence of the rift between Blacks and Obama. Here’s betting we will be seeing a Juan Williams special report on the truth behind the New Black Panther party.
Zuzu's Petals
Coincidentally, my local NPR station is in the middle of a fund drive.
I just donated for the first time in years as a thank-you for finally getting rid of Williams.
chopper
lolz. so grifty mcgrift thinks that the constitution guarantees you the right to violate at will your contract with your employer. makes sense that she’d know so little about that subject, her claim to fame is quitting the governorship of alaska before she even got anything done.
fasteddie9318
I think the best you can say for snooki is that she’s willfully ignorant. At the same time, though, there’s nothing that suggests that, if she actually did try to become informed and educated on the issues, it would have any effect. She seems like a cocktail of willful ignorance and high-level stupidity.
Napoleon
@Zuzu’s Petals:
A bunch of them are right now. I actually think that had a huge influence in his firing. He POs enough of the contributes during a fund drive people who ordinarily contribute just don’t, and I think NPR knows that.
ChrisNBama
John,
To most people, when someone says, “First Amendment Rights”, it means something outlined in the Constitution.
To the Reich Wing, it’s a dog whistle referring to librul political correctness run amok. In short, what she’s talking about isn’t the constitution but something else entirely.
chopper
@fasteddie9318:
lol, snowflake snookie and her husband ‘the griftuation’.
John O
@chopper:
Absolutely. “The Griftuation” should go viral.
John O
@chopper:
Absolutely. “The Griftuation” should go viral.
Zuzu's Petals
@Napoleon:
I liked letting them know I was rewarding them for good behavior.
quaint irene
Just saw today a preview for her reality show on TLC. Don’t know if this was the title or just a description, ‘Sarah’s Back Yard.”
Good God, how the unworthy are awarded.
Allan
@Calouste: Dunning-Kruger 2012!