NPR and other liberals are trying to convert the firing of Juan Williams into another episode of bullying conservatism. NPR deployed Jon Stewart in self-defense on Tuesday’s Morning Edition. Anchor Steve Inskeep noted Stewart’s arrival in Washington, DC marked his first show since the Williams purge, and they ran this joke:
STEWART [From the Daily Show]: Are you kidding me, NPR? Are you picking a fight with Fox News? They gave Juan Williams a $2 million contract just for you firing him. NPR, you just brought a tote bag full of David Sedaris books to a knife fight.
NPR suggested that this came in the spirit of "sanity" and that Stewart's rally is designed to "take it down a notch." But wasn’t NPR the network who took a knife to Juan's career, and Fox the ones with a tote bag full of goodies? In The New York Times, Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter also explained that liberalism is losing because it’s not doltishly simple, it’s too complex for the average American:
Simple ideology routinely trounces nuanced pragmatism, just as emotion so often beats reason and the varsity fullback will most likely deck the captain of the debate team in a fistfight.
For four decades, conservatives have used the word "liberal" as an epithet, while liberals have used "conservative" defensively ("I'm a little conservative on . . ."). And Fox fans range out of factual bounds ("death panels") more than their NPR-listening counterparts in the liberal "-reality-based community" (a term attributed to a Bush White House aide by the author Ron Suskind).
This is liberal arrogance on stilts: conservatives are so much more willing to exaggerate and lie than we are, the guardians of reality. This, from Jonathan Alter, the man who wrote in 2005 that "We're seeing clearly now that Bush thought that 9/11 gave him a license to act like a dictator." Wasn't that "ranging out of factual bounds"? Alter added that liberals are at a disadvantage because they are just so much more complex and sophisticated than the grade-school GOP:
As Senator Al Franken says of the Republicans: "Their bumper sticker . . . it's one word: `No.' . . . Our bumper sticker has - it's just way too many words. And it says, `Continued on next bumper -sticker.' "
