Not A Dime for NPR From This Little Piggy

Constitution, Ilana On Radio & TV, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Regulation, Taxation, The State

The following is from my new, WND.COM column, “Not a Dime From NPR From This Little Piggy”:

“A classmate of mine, an Israeli Arab, taught me a phrase I will paraphrase here, as it was indelicate in the original: There is nothing wrong with carving a little something for yourself out of the hind end of a pig. Translated: If you hold the person you’re scheming on robbing in contempt — by all means, rob him blind. (My friend was the recipient of a scholarship courtesy of the Israeli taxpayer whom he despised — you can see where our disagreement lay.)

For today’s purposes, the justified robber is the Public Broadcaster in all its offshoots — NPR (National Public Radio), PBS (Public Broadcasting Service), and, in my case, ‘KCTS 9 Connects,’ of Washington State. The hind end belongs to the American taxpayer. The propagandists hate their meal ticket, but feed off its flesh all the same.

To his credit, the recently fired Ron Schiller, President of the NPR Foundation and Senior VP for Development at NPR, has agreed with fiscal conservatives on the need to eliminate federal funding for his organization, which gets $90 million annually off the backs of some “seriously racist, racist” taxpayers.” (Schiller’s words.) Scrap that: doing away with taxpayer subsidies for public broadcasting was a point of agreement between this NPR functionary and a few fictitious Muslim philanthropists.

Members of the so-called Muslim Education Action Center Trust had lured Schiller to lunch. Amir Malik and Ibrahim Kasaam were really associates of gonzo journalist James O’Keefe, who played the pimp in the ACORN undercover operation. The luncheon was a trap. The bait: breaking bread with two blokes who boasted about their ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. … Boy, does O’Keefe know how to whet appetites at NPR!” ….

The complete column is “Not a Dime From NPR From This Little Piggy,” now on WND.COM.

Subscribe to my newsletter, HERE.

Befriend me on Facebook.

Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/IlanaMercer

UPDATED: Were Walid Phares Jewish, He’d Be A Pharisee

Anti-Semitism, Foreign Policy, Middle East, Neoconservatism, War

Dr. Walid Phares is the Fox News Channel’s Middle East and Terrorism Expert. He has been advocating a muscular military response in Libya. Somewhere on the Fox News’, moving-pictures-only website (in this vicinity), there is an interview in which Phares says that, “If the opposition in Libya cannot cross the Syrt line on the coast and head towards Tripoli, it is clear that there will be stalemate and only international intervention would end the crisis. The US must consider the fact that if the crisis stretch too long, even the uprising areas could be infiltrated.” (The excerpt is from Dr. Phares’ more script-friendly website, here.)

Pharisee,” which originally referred to a “member of an ancient Jewish sect that emphasized strict interpretation and observance of the Mosaic law in both its oral and written form,” has also come to mean a “hypocritically self-righteous person.” (FreeDictionary.com)

I wager that if Walid were a Jewish neoconservative, and not an Arab one, he’d be accused of being “a fifth columnist; a person with dual loyalties, a ‘binational.'”

UPDATE: Tom, I fail to see why you think my post is such a harsh criticism of Phares. It shows you how lukewarm and insipid public discourse has become if a sharp dig at the good doctor’s interventionism—or more likely, at the non-reaction to his militarism—is considered a devastating blow. Nonsense.

I like Phares on some counts; not on others. He just gets a pass because he is not a Jewish interventionist. If he were a Jew, the usual suspects would accuse him of recruiting poor American boys to die in order to safeguard oil for Israel, or something like that. I can never get conspiracy theories straight, as they are so unintuitive to me.

UPDATED: The Tyrant’s Intellectual (& Non-Egghead) Enablers

Celebrity, Critique, Ethics, Foreign Policy, Intellectualism, Media, Middle East, Neoconservatism, Propaganda, The Zeitgeist, Uncategorized

Much has been made of the American singers who sang for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. Nothing has been said of the intelligentsia that has sung his praise. There is a big difference between singing for your supper and singing songs of praise for this, and other, odious characters. Paul A. Rahe at The Chronicle of Higher Education dissects “The Intellectual as Courtier.” (Here, with thanks to my Canadian friend, Dr. Grant Havers.)

“If, in The Washington Post, one were to describe the elder Qaddafi as ‘a complex and adaptive thinker as well as an efficient, if laid-back, autocrat,’ if one were to call him ‘flexible and pragmatic,’ if one were to go on to suggest that ‘Libya under Qaddafi has embarked on a journey that could make it the first Arab state to transition peacefully and without overt Western intervention to a stable, non-autocratic government and, in time, to an indigenous mixed constitution favoring direct democracy locally and efficient government centrally,’ one would be apt—and with good reason—to be compared with Leni Riefenstahl, as Benjamin Barber was by Ken Silverstein at Harper’s Magazine.

Worse criticism would justifiably be in store for the intellectual sycophant who chose to write on the eve of the Libyan uprising, as Barber did at The Huffington Post, that Qaddafi ‘is not detested in the way that Mubarak has been detested and rules by means other than fear,’ especially if he were to add, ‘His son Seif, with a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the London School of Economics and two forthcoming books focused on liberalism in the developing world, has pioneered a gradualist approach to civil society in Libya, insisting along the way that he would accept no office that wasn’t subject to popular elections. No dynasty likely there.'”

READ ON.

[SNIP]

Because of their wide reach, Peggy Noonan (and her ilk)—while no intellectual— serves as a greater court courtesan than does the academic sycophant. As I chronicled in “LETHAL WEAPONS: NEOCON GROUPIES,” Noonan has gone as far as to conflate President Bush “with a Higher Power – Peggy believes God speaks through George W. Bush. From his furrows to his genitals, her high-flown linguistic banalities have lovingly depicted her man’s every inch. (See “He’s Got Two of ‘Em.”)

There are other culprits, of course.

UPDATE: Myron: You’re the funniest ever here on “nuance.” Why not cross-post this and other posts to the Facebook page, where the blog posts appear automatically? You’ll spice up the place in no time.

Watching The Words

Constitution, English, Glenn Beck, Internet, Journalism, Liberty, Literature, Media

Judge Andrew Napolitano delivered a fine editorial tonight on the not-so-wonderful-mind slot (The Glenn Beck Show). If only Fox News believed in the written word and posted the transcripts along with the image. (Good luck locating the same editorial on the Freedom Watch space.) For those of us who still like to read and post words, not images, FoxNews is one of the worst offenders. (I know, select transcripts will eventually propagate on the page, days later.) Reading is faster and more economical than watching a screen.