Why Is NPR Pissing Their Pants Because Of Some Right-Wing Cheap Shot Artist?

This is a couple weeks ago, but did you know that the head of National Public Radio was "resigned?"  And because some other top official was caught saying that right-wingnut teabaggers were racist?

First of all, this guy, Ron Schiller, a Vice-President with NPR, was right about right-wingnut teabaggers being racist.  Second of all, this was yet another set-up by that lying little prick, James O'Keefe.  He's the asshole who brought down ACORN and cost Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod her job, even though it turns out the hidden videotapes used to "out" ACORN and Sherrod were heavily edited.

No matter.  Ron Schiller apparently "resigned" about a week before the hidden camera leak.  Afterward, there was so much heat that NPR was the true racists that its CEO, Vivian Schiller, was effectively told to follow him out the door.  (Ron and Vivina Schiller are not related, which raises an non-sequitir question: Can you think of a last name less common than "Schiller" that two unrleated people in the same story share?  I can't.)

I'm still stunned that an institution as huge and as vaulted as National Public Radio would be shaken to its core by the ambushes by some punk-ass kid.  I mean, look at this fucker.  He brought down NPR?

But it's the same political stereotypes at work again, manifesting itself to intensely I'm once again starting to think they're not stereotypes.  Republicans are evil, duplicitous, cagey cheaters that can drum up false evidence to use as ammunition for their frequent verbal abuse disguised as self-victimization.  And Democrats are innocent, unsavvy, idealist schmucks who see they're getting yelled at from all sides and, in an effort to show that they're "above it all," decides to keep the peace by sacrificing themselves.  And O'Keefe and the right-wingnut teabaggers win again -- although media critics have since scrutinized the tape O'Keefe released about the lunch with the NPR exec and basically said, There's more shit going on here.  And although Ron Schiller was doing nothing but telling the truth.  And although James O'Keefe looks like he does.

Esquire gets it right: Fear is ruling the day, and the Republicans are the ones wielding it.  Come on, NPR, I want to like you.  I hated you back when I was assigned to listen to you by my college journalism professor, but now that I'm closer to death I listen to All Things Considered every afternoon.  Conservatives think you're too liberal, and liberals think you're too conservatve, which means you must be doing something right.

But the way you immediately go to the PR crisis playbook and execute the first rule -- fire the people in the middle of the controversy -- upon the first whiff of a hit piece by some guy who, as Esquire said, "by all rights should be shucking crawfish in a Louisiana prison farm," is bizarre.  Be like a Republican-run corporation and grow some balls for once.  Say something like, "I do not like the comments Ron Schiller made in that piece of videotape, but we recognize the source as someone who has heavily doctored similar videos in the past, so until James O'Keefe agrees to give us his unedited evidence, Mr. Schiller remains an employee of NPR."

See?  You should've done that.  Now it looks like you droppe a deuce in your tighty-whities because of some 26-year-old.  When you could have proven yourselves to be a paragon of rectitude you turned into a house made out of straw, demolished by an underhanded douchelord blowing his hot air.

Sad and pathetic.