Loud Was the Voice of the Lonely Goatherd

Readers of this blog pointed out - as did listeners on each story's NPR's web site - Steve Inskeep's cozy with House Republican leader, John Boehner on Wednesday morning, followed up on Thursday morning with an equally uncritical schmooze with Republican Senator Jon Kyl.

Here's a sample of the completely unchallenged statements by Boehner that Inskeep helped air:

• "We've reached out over the last year, and we're going to continue to reach out. But there has been no reaching back from the White House or from our Democrat colleagues."
• "Their trillion-dollar stimulus plan from a year ago clearly has not worked."
• "The president has a decision to make on Wednesday night: either listen to what the American people are saying, begin to work with Republicans in a bipartisan way and keep his campaign promises, or to ignore them and to continue to go down this very liberal path."

And here are some low-lights from the Kyl interview. Again not a single challenge or critique expressed:

• "And more than a year after he's sworn in, he's still complaining about the Bush administration...."
• "You know, he has created a huge deficit as a result of his spending. Now, he said, well, it was necessary to get us out of the mess. It wasn't. The $800 billion stimulus bill has been shown not to have provided the benefits that he said it would."
• "The point is that we are not saying no to everything, and we do not require 60 votes for everything. That's typical misrepresentation by the president..."

Seems like Inskeep has a hankering for right-wingers [e.g. Doug Feith or Republican Mike Murphy], but gets his undies in a bunch when he's talking to supposedly liberal Democrats such as Charles Rangle or Rahm Emmanuel.

*(thanks to Rodgers and Hammerstein for the title)