NPR firing of Juan Williams — it can’t get worse for Democrats?

The NPR firing of Juan Williams should cut off any perceived momentum that Democrats were hoping to gain through the NAACP’s attack on the Tea Parties. After all, it is Fox News that embraced Williams by giving him a new, lucrative contract extension after NPR fired him for stating that people in Muslim garb on a plane make him nervous.

For Tea Party Republicans, that could not be better timing. First they get to support a black, liberal journalist, hardly what one would expect from those whom the NAACP attacked as “racists.”

Secondly, they have been handed an easy answer to the BIG question being asked by Democrats and others — what are you going to cut? With one firing, the approximately $430 million that is the rotting corpse of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been put on the chopping block.

Third, while no one is saying it, the NPR actions show the absolute disdain that the leftists in power have for the concerns and values of Americans across the nation.

The politically correct culture that attempts to define anyone with concerns about the Islamic victory mosque going up in NYC as racist xenophobes while hiding in the shadows has been thrown out into the public square, and undecided voters are not exactly on their side.

Further, since Williams was fired for making his statements on another network, and not as a public broadcasting spokesman, it tears at the heart of the First Amendment argument that supporters of publicly funded television and radio have employed to take the high ground in the debate. Hard to have any high ground when it is clear that the only First Amendment free-speech rights that are tolerated at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting are those that conform to the views of management.

Not exactly the visual that Harry and Nancy were hoping for heading into the last week before Election Day. Republicans embracing and defending a black liberal journalist’s First Amendment rights, while advocating defunding government television and radio.

Clearly, they have to hope that the horse-race stories continue to overwhelm the victim-of-government-media story, or else any perceived momentum that they have gained over the past six weeks is likely to dissipate.

When the Democratic Party started throwing the Hail Mary of trying to convince conservative voters to support so-called Tea Party candidates over their Republican rivals, they probably thought it couldn’t get much worse. Clearly, they didn’t expect NPR to make a conservative martyr out of Juan Williams. It is almost enough to make me feel sorry for them — well, almost. 


Rick Manning is the current communications director for Americans for Limited Government. The views expressed in this blog are his, and don’t necessarily represent ALG’s.