Monday, October 16, 2006

Serving the Dark Lord

Inskeep (smug as usual) notes this morning that "the man who spoke these words" may get a seat on the security council. This is followed by an excerpt of Hugo Chavez' latest speech at the UN in which he calls Bush the Devil. Funny, that we never get to hear replays of the bits of nastiness that Bolton has voiced in the past or excerpts of Bush's "Axis of Evil" idiocy.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't know if you cover NPR's twin American Public Media also, but the NPR channel here has a 30 minute Marketplace "Morning Report" segment which also covered the Chavez/Security Council bid...and this was even stupider and more slanted, although thankfully brief.

[With Market Place these days, though, this is to be expected. And probably the only douchebag more annoying than Scott Simon on NPR these days (this has been measured scientifically) is the Dallas stock trader regularly interviewed on Market Place.]

Anonymous said...

Oh, NPR got *all* hopped up on the UN resolution re: N. Korea this weekend. It's as if it gave them a bit of respite for all the bad news facing the Not So Nice, Not So Polite Republicans. You could almost hear the collective sighs a-heaving.

Interestingly, re: the Foley scandal, they seem to have completely forgotten about the other rotten business re: Abramoff, Delay, Cunningham, etc., or merely see them as outliers and side notes. It's as if this Republican corruption culture just a sprung up from nowhere, all of a sudden like!

Anonymous said...

You know what your blog needs?

Some kind of open-thread comments section where people can comment on NPR stories while they listen ... which could later be picked up on/expanded on/commented on/critiqued on by you later.

For example, tonight on All Things Considered, there was a piece on the population of the USA reaching 300 million (100 Million more than when I was born: amazing). NPR treated this as a natural phenomenon, like the spring rains.
A question NEVER addressed was: do Americans want the population of their country to reach 400 million in less than 30 years? Do American citizens have a say in the country's population growth? Instead, ATC provides inane, fluffy questions and cute musical interludes while they skirt the political, economic, and environmental aspects of enormous population and immigration growth.

So, the occasional open comment thead would allow visiters/lurkers to say stuff like that, and would be a nice feature. And I could post this there instead of on the comments section on Chavez

And besides, the NPR ombudsman and their NPR blog are just worthless.

Anyway, I spend lots of time with NPR and it drives me nuts (it's radio syphilis), so a thread to vent for the proles would be nice.

(On the other hand, Warren Ellis deleted his comments section after terming the results "retard farming" , and God knows it drove Billmon nuts, so there is that...)

And thanks for the NPR critiques here, regardless. Keep up the good work.

Anonymous said...

What's really interesting in a business-as-usual-not-interesting-really kind of way was the fact that I finally got to hear more of Chavez' speech apart from the "devil" quote that the media seem fixated on. He discusses his reasons for his attack on Bush with references to Aristotle, even. He blasts America for trying to subvert democracies, take resources for elite interests, etc. Definitely the kind of info that would be to hard to put into context of "Crazy Chavez" that the media is comfortable with. But, that kind of nuance/true balance would not be something you'd want NPR to take any part of - it might make its listeners have to put down their Soy Lattes or be confused during their Bikram Yoga class.
Whether or not you support Chavez, and it's hard to know if you do when you don't get any real info, just ad hominem attacks on him, one thing to remember is that unlike our guy, the majority of his countrymen voted for him. Maybe that was why we had to support a coup against him? Might make me call someone a devil if they did that.