Don't you love it when a person on the public dime insults you? Well, perhaps you won't be hearing as much of it in the future from National Public Radio while you're helping pay their budget with your taxes.
With President Trump vowing to end federal funding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which oversees NPR and the Public Broadcasting Service, the frequent disparaging of conservatives by NPR talking heads might emanate instead from the dreaded private sector, assuming NPR and PBS can survive there.
In the lead-up to President Trump's nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, conservatives gritting their teeth through NPR's All Things Considered on Tuesday might have gotten a laugh from hearing legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg's perspective on Gorsuch --
ALL THINGS CONSIDERED HOST AUDIE CORNISH: Well, at this point we do, as you say, we've been talking about two names in particular (Gorsuch and Thomas Hardiman). What are the strong points for these candidates for the court?
TOTENBERG: They both have really long and distinguished records as judges, so, and we don't have the time to go through those, but Neil Gorsuch is young, he's 49. I think he'd be the youngest member of the court since Clarence Thomas more than a quarter century ago and he has a fine reputation as a cerebral judge but a very conservative judge and a good writer, his colleagues like him. Tom Hardiman on the Third Circuit is much beloved by his colleagues, has a reputation, as one of his friends put it, as a closet scholar.
Is it remotely possible to imagine perennial NPR fixture Totenberg ever uttering the words "cerebral but liberal"? Not when one considers that the average leftist has long believed the two words are synonymous, the better to service that fragile self-esteem. And how quaint that one of Judge Hardiman's "friends" deems him a "closet scholar" -- he even reads books! Hardiman apparently stands in sharp contrast to liberal jurists who aren't shy about trumpeting their academic bona fides.
When Totenberg appeared the following morning on MSNBC's Morning Joe, she offered a noticeably different take on Gorsuch --
MORNING JOE's JOE SCARBOROUGH: What can you tell us about the judge himself that Donald Trump selected?
TOTENBERG: Well, it's very interesting, I mean, from a psychological perspective and a personality perspective, he's the son of Anne Gorsuch Burford who was a bomb-throwing, take-no-prisoners head of the EPA during the Reagan administration. And he is known on his court as being unfailingly polite, a good listener, a great colleague, anything but a bomb thrower. His bombs are cerebral bombs and they're very effective.
So when she appears on NPR with its predominantly liberal audience, Totenberg describes Gorsuch in a way her listeners would approve -- cerebral but conservative -- and when she answers a question from a former Republican congressman, she answers in a way that he would approve -- cerebral and effective.
Keep in mind that this is the same NPR legal affairs correspondent who once claimed that then Supreme Court nominee Sonya Sotomayor was more conservative than actual conservative Antonin Scalia.
In fairness to Totenberg, she has yet to deploy her heavy artillery this time around. Back in 2005 during the confirmation hearing for Bush high court nominee John Roberts, Totenberg repeatedly described Roberts as "very, very conservative" and at one point even hyperventilated that he was "very, very, very conservative." (Translation: Run for your lives!) Give her time, though, the Gorsuch gauntlet has only begun.
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