Thumbsuckers

By Michael J. Smith on Friday March 2, 2012 07:54 PM

So I spent a lot of time in the car today, and you know what that means:

*cue spooky echo effect*

N-P-R-R-R... Mwahahaha!

The first segment I heard was about the (apparently) upcoming Israeli attack on Iran(*). It was a very odd conversation, from my point of view: all about instrumentalities.

  • Can the Israelis overfly the necessary Arab states without being shot down? (Answer: an obvious and uncontroversial yes.)
  • Can they refuel mid-air without US help? (Answer, since nobody on NPR knows the first thing about military matters: Who knows? Who cares? The problem will be solved somehow.)
  • What would the leaders of the docile Arab client states think? (Answer, again obvious and uncontroversial: They'd love it. Check. That's all right, then.)
  • What would the 'Arab Street' think? (Answer: they wouldn't like it, but who cares?)
It was both demented and revolting. It was like overhearing three or four strait-jacketed madmen in a public mental hospital: Napoleon, Genghis, Alexander, and Attila swapping stories about their various campaigns. All in a very reasonable, judicious, on-the-one-hand and on-the-one-hand-again tone. Nobody wondering whether, for example, anybody had any right to bomb Iran. Apparently it goes without saying that Uncle and Mini-Me have an absolute and uncontroversible right to bomb whomever, whenever.

Then they Segwayed -- whoosh, hum -- to the late, unlamented, uninteresting Andrew Breitbart.

There were about ten seconds of obligatory de-mortuis pieties, and then, man oh man, did they ever cut loose on the dead guy. How they hated him. It made me want to like him -- a tall order, admittedly, but if I hear these sanctimonious boobs much more on the subject, I will find a way.

One long-in-the tooth contributor to the circle-jerk wanted to compare him to dear old Dick Tuck, but couldn't quite remember the name. The others drew a complete blank on this reference. History seems to have started in, what, 2001?

The really fun part was the unanimous indignation about the fact that there are no gatekeepers anymore. "Ten years ago, he would have had to go through the newspapers, the radio stations... nobody would ever have heard of Breitbart!"

Sic transit gloria mundi, NPR; and fuck you to the wall.

----------------

(*) NPR is treating this as a foregone conclusion, but of course they're Zionist drone idiots.

Comments (14)

I blame NPR for enabling Breitbart. They should take their cue from him and fucking die.

MJS:

Amen, brother.

Chomskyzinn:

One of the NPR shows had the drippy, self congratulatory, sanctimonious tagline, something like:Smart Dialog, Civil Conversation. To which I always want to add: "....between sociopaths."

Another sells itself as an an antidote to the "screaming talking heads that dominate..." then proceeds to say the same things, and trade in the same conventional wisdom, as the "screamers."

sk:

Just as the beautiful liberal souls who listen to NPR despise flyover country bumpkins that keep religious broadcasters profitable, in the only Democracy in the Middle East™ it was the glib "social democrats" who emptied dozens of villages in an afternoon, created an Apartheid state, and now regard the technocratic administering of some ultraviolence to Iranians as perfectly kosher:


It was not religious people who coined the phrase ‘demographic problem’; it was not they who legislated the Law of Return [giving Jews abroad the right to immigrate to Israel]; it was not they who founded the Jewish National Fund; not they who declared the policy to make the Negev and Galilee more Jewish.

Of course, this does not stop these NPR addicted humanists from calling religious people "circus freaks," "nutcases", etc. (as mentioned in a post here few weeks ago), even though the ancestors of Rabbi Meir Hirsch got along just fine with the natives of Jerusalem as seen in this video made just before the First Zionist Congress was held in Switzerland.

Op:

NPR

Is prolly receiving nuanced signals not from AIPACers
but muscular cookie pushers over at State

Purpose

Intensfy the all court Iranian rough up bluff
The bark that dare not reveal it's got no bite

Syria is more then enough arena for uncle's
On going proxy war on the black-towel heads


fort Zion is not a proxy but a ward like Robin

yes mini me is like a mr Hyde's Robin

Op:

Btw

Thumbsucker needs a one way ride in alex's tumbril

And once it's severed from the living language
I can ask what it means

MJS:

I like 'thumbsucker'. IIRC it's a term of art among newspaper folk for a 'think piece' without any reportage -- and usually without much thinking, either, if the truth be known. By extension, a person who writes such pieces.

Christopher:

"Ten years ago, he would have had to go through the newspapers, the radio stations... nobody would ever have heard of Breitbart!"

Whereas today, he did go through the newspapers and the radio stations.

If there was a time when people with nothing whatsoever to say were kept outside the gates by the media, it wasn't during my lifetime. Have we all forgotten Ann Coulter so easily?

Painful memories scripted so well it almost makes this one wistful enough to turn on NPR again. Curse you, Mr. Smith. :)

Anonymous:

mjs

ya that makes sense
so in the editorial meetings ...

however out here in electronic dronesville
its over uss these days
is enough to get its neck chopped
if the teror remedy seems too gauche
or to like PC tactics used on PCs

then i implore u
at least call in a substitute

navel gazer or chin scratcher
i'm sure are willing and eager
to come off the bench

but there's more to this for me

its implication of infantilization
strike me as an implicit display of unwarrented
and frrankly unwelcomed confidence
in the ownself inner maturity
of the labeling entity

now i doubt this applies most times and certainly not to u father s

but call the enemy other an infant

why i kinda think infants have more sense
then to be my enemy and if they are
i get a kick out of it

unauthorized a priori negative reactions are the staf of thought

op:

as inevitable adults we oral needs types suck on other then the thumb
the wombs one remedy
alas much other then the thumb much much other

is it our arrestedness ?

why not ..cretainly
the literal nurturing side of motherhood
for most of ur generation
was about as good as the home cooking

inadequate rushed and done while distracted

Hell, Smiff; you think you've got it bad? When the DW and I are headed someplace in the car, and she can't make up her mind which CDs to load into the changer... yeah, that's right, out comes NPR -- here in DC, usually in the person of WAMU, home of Thirty-Six Straight Hours Of Bluegrass, interrupted only by Some Things Considered, and Diane Rehm's program. If you've never heard Diane, you're in for a treat. I discovered -- if that's the word -- Diane in the mid'90s, as she was making excuses for President Bubba's planned invasion of Haiti. I swear, she sounds like a really bad Katherine Hepburn impersonator. The only reason I pay attention to Diane Rehm for more than five minutes at a time is that I've never heard anyone have a heart attack on the radio before.

You're lucky you got stuck with the talk shows, though. When the wife and I are in the car, it's usually either Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me -- whose smug-toned host makes me want to hunt him down and beat the shit out of him -- or Prairie Home Companion. To this day, I'm mystified as to how long that slab of electric Zoloft has managed to stay on the air for so long, and who all these people are who think Garrison Keillor is funny. Granted, Keillor's WLT, A Radio Romance was a helluva book, and quite funny, but his performances on Prairie Home Companion make me want to rip my own skin off. Why the hell is that still on? Are there really that many snooty old Liberals out there who want to show that they're really down with the People?

I'm truly amazed that the same state that gave us Prairie Home Companion also gave us Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Oh, and I almost forgot: My tribute to Little Andy Breitbart:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AXrv2EER2AQ/T0_7NURtS5I/AAAAAAAAAQc/ogBFYwNk1c4/s400/breitbartmeltdown4up500w02.jpg

I enjoy listening to NPR news. It's fun!

I particularly enjoy listening to "Steve" Inskeep of Morning Edition. He makes my morning more well informed as I ponder the events of the day, sip my coffee and eat a well-balanced breakfast.

It's just the thing I need before checking my emails and heading off to the office for a busy day.

I don't think so, I think they don't have enough supplies for weapons and ammo. They also buy it from the US forces.

"Eustass" for receveur de douche extra plat 

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