NPR’s Cokie Roberts Leads the Schorr Patrol for Obama
“NPR’s Cokie Roberts: Romney Poland Trip Racially Motivated,” John Nolte reports at Big Journalism:
What’s important about the NPR excerpt below, which broadcast this morning, is that this is everything NPR’s Cokie Roberts has to say about Romney’s motives for going to Poland. This is the entirety of it. You can listen for yourself here, but when Roberts was asked why Poland, the sole motive Roberts came up with is a racial one.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you your tax dollars at work:
LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST: So today is Poland. Why is he stopping in Poland. What does he hope to accomplish with that?
Cokie Roberts: Well, I think part of it was a desire to portray President Obama as something of a wimp, and say he’s abandoned Eastern Europe. But look, you remember well the Reagan Democrats. Those ethnic white voters who had been Democrats for many years; turned out for Ronald Reagan, and have been fairly predictable Republicans since then. Now it’s a smaller percentage of the population — of the voting population — than it used to be, but white voters are still much more Republican than any other group in the electorate. They went for McCain in 2008 by 55%. And I think that getting those ethnic voters excited is really what Romney has in mind here. It’s more for the folks at home — the descendents of the people that he will be speaking to — in Poland.
As you can see, according to Roberts, Romney didn’t go to Poland to gain some foreign policy experience or to prepare himself to be president or to help differentiate between his values and those of our current president. No, it was all some dark, divisive, cynical, racial plan to suck up to us rural white bitter-clingers.
Yep, Romney went to Poland to blow a big racial dog-whistle.
This is pure McCarthyism on Roberts’s part. Nothing more, nothing less.
Daniel Schorr was a former CBS journalist who spent his dotage at NPR; evidently he willed his playbook to the latter network upon his demise in 2010. Earlier this month, when Howard Kurtz reviewed Douglas Brinkley’s new biography, Cronkite, he mentioned a couple of Cronkite and Schorr’s most notorious moments:
But [Cronkite] was far more liberal than the public believed, and he let it show in unacceptable ways. Had Cronkite pulled such stunts today, I would probably be among those calling for him to step down.
Barry Goldwater distrusted him from the start, and with good reason. On the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Cronkite nodded his head in thinly veiled contempt when handed a note on air that the Arizona senator had said “no comment.” Goldwater was attending his mother-in-law’s funeral that day.
“Whether or not Senator Goldwater wins the nomination,” Cronkite told viewers another day, “he is going places, the first place being Germany.” Although Goldwater had merely accepted an invitation to visit a U.S. Army facility there, correspondent Daniel Schorr said he was launching his campaign in “the center of Germany’s right wing.”
More on that incident from Newsbusters in 2010:
Daniel Schorr’s passing on Friday, at age 93, reminded me of the kind of assaults CBS News unleashed on conservatives before there were any countervailing forums available. A 2001 Weekly Standard article (nine years in my “pending” file!) detailed a particularly vicious left-wing hit piece he narrated in 1964 which linked Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater with neo-Nazis in Germany, a CBS Evening News story notorious enough to earn a mention – if without any censure – in the New York Times and Washington Post obituaries.
In a June of 2001 Weekly Standard review of a memoir by Schorr about his years with CBS, CNN and NPR, Andrew Ferguson recited the piece which aired during the GOP’s convention:
“It looks as though Senator Goldwater, if nominated, will be starting his campaign here in Bavaria, center of Germany’s right wing” also known, Schorr added helpfully, as “Hitler’s one-time stomping ground.” Goldwater, he went on, had given an interview to Der Spiegel, “appealing to right-wing elements in Germany,” and had agreed to speak to a conclave of, yes, “right-wing Germans.” “Thus,” Schorr concluded, “there are signs that the American and German right wings are joining up.” Now back to you, Walter, and have a nice day!
If Romney’s staff sounds appropriately testy with old media — wait, is their boss a wimp or a bully this week? — it’s having to put up with smears from the Palace Guard that elected and protect Obama, such as Roberts’ pathetic attempt at blowing the raaaaacist dog whistle. On the other hand, perhaps they’ll have plenty of time to develop their skills at handling them.
I’m fascinated by people like Roberts, who have been around long enough to have played by the old rules (that basically allowed liberals to snipe around the edges, but avoid out-and-out irrational attacks on whomever the conservative of the day happened to be), yet have now decided to let their full liberal freak flags fly, saying things in 2012 she never would have thought of uttering while sitting next to George Will on David Brinkley’s roundtable in 1992.
It’s not that baseless liberal attacks weren’t around, but it were usually left to alternative publications like the Village Voice to make them. The libs in the standard big media publications and TV networks held their tongues in a way similar to how the pre-1968 Hays Code kept Hollywood from going off the deep end with sex and violence. And as with that change — which some directors, writers and actors reacted to like kids in a naughty candy store — people like Cokie or Howard Fineman who were part of the ‘respectable’ liberal punditry class 20-30 years ago have gone full-bore into character assassination on conservatives, even against someone like Mitt Romney, who just a few months ago they were assuring us was the only sane person not named Jon Huntsman in the GOP primary field.
National Progressive Radio is flush with cash from the likes of George Soros, the Tides Foundation, and a number of other Progressive/Left organizations. They’ve shaken off enough calls for defunding to know congressional Republicans aren’t serious. Roberts can get away with it because she knows she’s untouchable.
The Propaganda and Lies Ministry has many divisions.
Google?
Twitter?
MSN?
They certainly give off every appearance of working in concert…the JournOlista crowd going high tech.
NPR is the slow boat to China.
Cokie Roberts is a Democratic shill, the parish law equivalent of a Chicago machine “friend of the machine”.
These people only ask tough questions of opponents of the furthest left candidate in any particular race. (the Clintons got bit by this snarling dog, originally their own lapdog)
But, JournOlista slime hasn’t been exposed from its underground cave, it simply went deeper underground and more high tech.
Just ask Gary Adams. If they can edit out words to make someone look like a racist and they can shut somebody down on their Twitter account, they can make inane remarks about Polish “bitter clingers” being racist.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/07/31/did-twitter-alert-nbc-to-critical-tweets/#more-801156
Cokie, certainly is a shill, but she’s not a commissar shill, she’s not smart enough.
It is obvious that, while JournoList may no longer exist, something exactly like it is in the wind.
What is clear is that the captive presstitutes will go after Romney for any imagined fault while excusing the Kenyan for real crimes. We can survive this and overcome the bias.
But, let’s not lose an opportunity. Now we must identify the media types who are nothing more than left wing/Bam propagandists and do what we can to neutralize them so that after the election, they can not try to eternally weaken Romney (as they did to Bush).
So she means to say that Romney went to Poland to score points with the coveted Polish/Eastern European vote? Doesn’t that group live largely in the Chicago area making their votes virtually irrelevant because of IL’s strong Democratic base? Where do they come up with this stuff?
Ding ding ding. As a Chicago resident, I say you got that one exactly right. (of course, all the Poles I interact with–typically highly skilled carpenters–are illegal, ha ha)
I Cokie trying to make amends for her father’s overt racism. Look up Hale Boggs. The Boggs family apparently views life through the prism of race.
Cokie Boggs the daughter of Hale Boggs the racist congressman from Louisiana. Hale Boggs signed the southern manifesto condemning the Supreme Courts’ Brown vs The Board of Education decision and voted against every Civil Rights act. He was later punished by “the party of civil rights” for his racism by being elected minority whip. I’ve heard her do nothing but make excuses for her father’s actions.
This is Cokie’s way of absolving her conscious by smearing Republicans. All she’s ever done is make excuses for the “Dixiecrats”. It’s like those leftist Germans who preach and point fingers who are later exposed as once being in the SS.
Conscious=Conscience
The Cokester seriously posits that Romney is seeking Polish-Americans’ votes — by campaigning to their ancestors? (“Ancestor” being the correlative of “descendant.” Not “descendent.”) That is one airy fantasy, right there.
Poles are about as steadfastly Machine Democrat as a hyphenated-minority can get. She may succeed here in alienating the rock-steadiest blue-collar core constituency her party ever enjoyed. And if so, Marcy Kaptur’s in real trouble.
If Marcy loses to Joe the Plumber, blame NPR. I like the sound of it.
NPR has had some particularly egregious stories on the last week or so, full court tilt socialism and Obama good, Eeeevil Republicans bad. You hear of some right wing commentators…Goldberg for one, and, oh, let’s not split too many hairs but Glenn Reynolds another…who think NPR does a good job. Not sure what they mean by that, unless doing a good job is pushing soft and not so soft left wing propaganda.
People like Cokie Roberts need to be questioned by the new media over and over again, particularly with a camera in their face. She needs to be repeatedly asked questions about her late father’s racist past. She needs to be asked why she is wearing the Obama campaign’s kneepads. Just lay it on thick and watch her run off crying. It’s time to punch back twice as hard. It’s time to get down and dirty with the LSM.
I sympathize with the emotion but disagree with the tactic. The focus must be on winning the election. To attack Roberts’ late father will influence no one favorably and Roberts is, herself, in a position to “hit back twice as hard” – even harder than she is now punching. I suspect these “journalists” are motivated, as they age, to work even harder for their ideological goals.
I had christened her Cokie “The Razor” Roberts to mark her efforts as an NPR hack back in the Bork-Thomas era. Her crime partner was Nina “The Assassin” Totenberg.
I’m voting against Todd Akin (MO R 2nd, but running for MO Senate), in large part, due to is impotency on defunding NPR. If the Republicans cannot even do that, I don’t need them (they’ll never get around to getting rid of DHS, DoEs, EPA…). Maybe Sarah Steelman has what Todd Akin lacks.
Romney is guilty of “Campaigning while white” and the old media is determined to see him prosecuted for it…or is that persecuted?