On Friday's All Things Considered, NPR anchor Robert Siegel began the "Week in Politics" segment with a serious focus on San Bernardino, but he "couldn't resist" creating a tag-team mockery of conservative presidential candidate Ben Carson for pronouncing Hamas like it rhymed with "Thomas." Like Mark Finkelstein found on Morning Joe, these media elites wanted to claim he said "hummus," which is funnier.
ROBERT SIEGEL: Ben Carson appears to be dropping in the polls. And he didn't help himself yesterday at a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition. In his description of the two major Palestinian factions, Dr. Carson pronounced Hamas in such a way as to suggest hummus, a Middle Eastern chickpea mash.
BEN CARSON: The challenge is the split between Fatah and Hamas. Fatah and Hamas operate in a constant state of conflict. Fatah rules the West Bank. Hamas rules the Gaza Strip.
SIEGEL: I just couldn't resist playing that. He didn't quite say hummus, actually, but it came close. David...
DAVID BROOKS: It's better than the split between Fatah and matzo.
SIEGEL: (Laughter).
E.J. DIONNE: Or the Tabbouleh insurgents in Afghanistan, perhaps.
The NPR anchor "resists" routinely when the Democrats make gaffes. Like Obama in 2010 mispronouncing "corpsman." This is the same NPR program which just a few weeks ago ran a segment headlined “10 Joe Biden Moments You Should Hear Again.” Because he’s “the nation's charming but eccentric uncle.”
What a transparent bunch of taxpayer-funded partisans.
Earlier in the segment, Siegel at least noted that whatever gun controls California thought it had, none of them worked in San Bernardino:
E.J. DIONNE: Will we suddenly take those [gun sales] laws - the possibility of such laws more seriously now that we're more worried about this sort of terrorism? In the Senate last week, it didn't seem so. There was a provision proposed that if you're on the no-fly list, you've got to be restricted in buying guns. That didn't pass. So you can't fly, but you can buy a gun. That seems odd.
SIEGEL: Well, as people raised the point, they said, here is a couple that wasn't on any no-fly list. Whatever might have been done to prevent people accused of terrorist links from getting a gun or doing anything else wouldn't have stopped these people. They don't seem to be mentally ill. There's no record of hospitalization. And none of the steps that have been proposed, except for just saying, look, it should be a lot harder to buy a gun - that seemed to be about the only...
DIONNE: Which seems a sensible idea to me.
David Brooks talked about "deglamorizing" ISIS, but agreed like an elitist socialist on the feeling about guns: "Any gun that makes you look like Rambo-esque, you don't need to have it."
