On NPR's Morning Edition on Monday, anchor Steve Inskeep welcomed a regular guest, Wall Street Journal economics editor David Wessel (from the liberal news side, not the conservative opinion-page side). The new Congress is already too "shrill" and "ugly" with libertarian argument against Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke's printing money to buy government bonds:
INSKEEP: Rand Paul is a name that got a lot of attention in the election this past Tuesday. He won a Senate seat from Kentucky. But, of course, his father, Ron Paul, ran for president a couple of years back, is still in the House, and it looks like he's going to chair the committee that oversees Ben Bernanke's Fed.
WESSEL: That's right. Ron Paul, who wrote a book called "End the Fed" - so you know what he thinks ought to happen. He'll definitely give Mr. Bernanke a hard time, but he's really seen as something of an outlier. He's a Libertarian. He doesn't believe in paper money. And I don't think many of the other Republicans are quite comfortable with that view. But it will be interesting to have him in the House and his son, a senator from Kentucky, taking a seat that was vacated by another shrill critic of the Fed, Jim Bunning. So, it will be a lot of fireworks there, I'm sure.
INSKEEP: Could this get ugly?
WESSEL: Look, it got pretty ugly already. We saw the Fed accused of setting a fire and then taking credit for putting it out. We saw Ben Bernanke almost didn't get confirmed for a second term. I think it will be tense if the economy is bad, because members of Congress and the public will be looking for someone to blame, and Mr. Bernanke is very prominent right now, especially because of his decision to buy so many more government bonds.
NPR would never find someone too "shrill" in supporting, say, ObamaCare, or find they've gotten "ugly" in demonizing insurance or pharmaceutical companies. These adjectives are saved for people who are hostile to the European-style socialism favored by the government-subsidized public broadcasting elite.
