Things You Hear on NPR: Everything Is Political, Comrade

In observance of the Thanksgiving holiday, yesterday’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me quiz show on NPR was a clip show, a parade of past guests, interspersed with host Peter Sagal joking (several times) that you can avoid unpleasant arguments about politics around the Thanksgiving dinner table by claiming that you’ve just been listening to these Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me celebrity interviews all year.

And then of course politics came up over and over again anyway: making fun of Sarah Palin, agreeing that Dick Cheney is scary and awful—one of the guests had even literally teamed up with President Obama to make fun of a Republican congressman, apparently.  Of the ones I listened to,* most of the guests’ interviews ended up getting into politics—and of course guests, host, and panelists were all on the same page, identifying with the same team, with the left and against the right.

Five Things to Keep in Mind when the Left Goes Crazy over the Planned Parenthood Shooting

For those who want to blame last Friday’s Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood shooter on the pro-life movement:

First, the movement that’s entirely about opposition to murder obviously does not support murder.  All the pro-life leaders condemn the Planned Parenthood shooting.

Second, this guy had nothing to do with the local pro-life movement.  The Washington Times reports,

A Roman Catholic priest who has held weekly Mass in front of the clinic for 20 years said Dear wasn’t part of his group.

“I don’t know him from Adam,” said Rev. Bill Carmody. “I don’t recognize him at all.”

NPR in One Sentence

“But sociology graduate student Nicole Bedera says she found that ad to be insufficiently feminist.”

That about sums it up…

The Plonking Earnestness of the New York Times

I saw this headline on a New York Times column:

“The Scary Specter of Ted Cruz”

I thought it was meant ironically.  (The over-the-top double deprecation is a clear signal, right?)  I thought, That’s interesting!  Someone writing in the New York Times is actually going to push back on some of the left’s more extreme emotional overreactions to conservatism, possibly even using humor and poking fun at them.

Things You Hear on NPR: Hillary Clinton’s Scandals Are All the More Reason She Should Get in the Race!

On Morning Edition last week:

LIASSON: That’s right. The Clintons’ family foundation took money from foreign governments while she was secretary of state. Now, most of them were ongoing commitments that had been made before she joined the Obama administration, but one donation — $500,000 from the government of Algeria for Haitian earthquake relief — was made during her tenure. And this has struck many people as a conflict of interest and, again, it revived all the old Clinton tropes — the rules don’t apply to them, they’re blind to appearances of impropriety, conflict of interest, it looks like pay-to-play, and it reminded people of the fundraising scandals of the 1990s.

Things You Hear on NPR: We’re Pretty Sure These Cases We Didn’t Read Support Our Narrative

NPR this morning painted a picture in which Republicans twist the courts for partisan advantage:

By the same 5-4 vote, the court’s conservatives — all Republican appointees — prevailed over the court’s liberals — all Democratic appointees — on campaign finance regulations, union power and mandated contraceptive coverage for corporations under the Affordable Care Act. . . .

‘The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday—but never jam today.’

Jonah Goldberg has an interesting piece at National Review Online today: “The Myth of the Good Conservative” (“For liberals, he always existed yesterday”).  The thesis is as the subtitle implies: that certain liberals are always praising particular conservatives of the past and/or hypothetical conservatives in general, to whom particular conservatives and conservative policy proposals of today supposedly compare unfavorably.