With "balance" like this, is it any wonder that right-wingers hold NPR in special scorn among the vast hordes of the liberal media?

Today's "balance" quiz: Let's say you're going to have Colorado freshman Sen. Cory Gardner as a guest to shred the president's SOTU address on behalf of the Crackpot Scumbag Party. How would you "balance" him? Take a few seconds to think about it. What's that? With a self-styled conservative Democrat, you say? Ding-ding-ding!

by Ken

After the nifty close look our friend Gaius Publius just gave the president's SOTU speech, surely nobody expects me to have anything smart to say about the speech. Besides, as I noted yesterday, I have the additional handicap of not having seen, heard, or read it. The specifics just don't seem to matter all that much, considering that mostly all that's going to result is more talk.

As I also explained, in the case of such events, I trust to a process of osmosis to sort of squoosh whatever I need to know about the speech into my pores. And sure enough, from the moment I woke up it was pouring out of the radio at me. NPR's Morning Edition was awash in SOTU yammering. Of course I wasn't listening all that carefully, but I see on the Web page for yesterday's show that, along with Mara Liasson's report, "Obama Lays Out Ambitious Agenda In Address To Nation," which I don't remember hearing but which I assume gave some representation to the president's views, there were features like "Fact Checking Obama's State Of The Union Speech" and "Republicans Charge Obama Isn't Serious About Working With Them."

I was charmed to note that when the broadcast turned to a pair of senators for comment, they were carefully chosen. There was on the one hand conservative Dem Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and on the other hand scumbag crackpot Republican Cory Gardner of Colorado.


That's right, you "balance" a lying-scumbag right-wing Republican with hearty Conservadem Heidi Heitkamp.

No, Senator Gardner, the Colorado freshman, wasn't identified as a "scumbag crackpot Republican (some things, it seems, you have to know on your own), but Senator Heitkamp was emphatically identified as a conservative Democrat from a conservative state, and was asked about how she works with the president on mattters where her and her state's views are more conservative. So conservative Democratic senators were represented, and scumbag crackpot Republicans, and since it's not as if there are non-scumbag-crackpot Republicans to talk to (please don't talk to me about Maine's Suzie Q. Collins; I did notice that she was grousing about the president's failure to try to cooperate with Republicans -- just the way she used to bitch about Chimpy the Prez Bush's failure to try to cooperate with Democrats, right?), I guess all the major Senate constituencies were covered.

Let's just double-check:

• Conservative Dems, check.

• Republicans, check.

Um, er, up, that's it. That's all there is, right?

With "balance" like that, is it any wonder that right-wingers hold NPR in special scorn among the vast hordes of the liberal media?

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