“NPR Mocks Michelle Malkin’s Family After Her Cousin Goes Missing,” the Gently Hew Stone blog notes:
This morning on NPR’s popular comedy show, Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, a segment aired where a contestant had to choose which of three strange news stories was actually true. One of the (false) options concerned conservative commentator Michelle Malkin. The NPR show joked that, after Malkin had advertised her belief that President Obama is a “secret Muslim” and that she believes other “secret Muslims” are “taking over this country,” she found, to her dismay, that her own grandfather was a Muslim.
First of all, while the humor of this segment was based on the idea that Malkin must be a hypocrite with a Muslim relative (which even the show acknowledged was untrue), the setup was based on the premise as I described it above, which the narrator clearly presented as factual.
I’ve followed Malkin’s blog and columns for years now, and she has never said that President Obama is a Muslim, nor does she believe that Muslims, “secret” or otherwise, are somehow “taking over this country.” While she does report on multiethnic strife in many areas of the world, including ours, as a result of political correctness and lack of assimilation, nothing she has ever written comes close to the bizarre, mean caricature aired this morning on NPR.
But NPR’s mistake goes far beyond mere slander. Their joke targeted the family of a specific conservative at a time when that specific conservative’s family is suffering a tragedy. Quite a coincidence. It’s been two weeks since Malkin’s cousin Marizela Perez went missing, possibly the victim of a kidnapping. Malkin has used her media presence tirelessly since then to help find her young relative. Either NPR and Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me are not nearly as well-informed in their news awareness as they’d like us to believe, or they cruelly decided to go ahead with a particularly tasteless joke.
Ironically, just before this segment aired, they made fun of Gilbert Gottfried getting fired for his tasteless jokes about the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. Pot, meet kettle.
The premise of Jobrani’s p.c. comedy gag is completely false, as actual readers of my work know. I was one of the first conservatives to criticize Birthers who go to the extreme and have never accused President Obama of being a “secret Muslim.” To the contrary, I’ve criticized him for his rather open and out-of-the-closet apologias for jihad and his perfunctory, bloodless, vague public condemnations of Islamic terror attacks on Americans. As for my “fear that there are Muslims amongst us who are hiding their true identity,” go ask Attorney General Eric Holder what “keeps him up at night.”
Jobrani’s a poor man’s Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert, pandering to progressives with lazy caricatures of the Right, with the encouragement and approval of high-minded libs practicing supposedly indispensable, public interest journalism that rural America can’t live without, don’t you know!?
How many conservative comedians (besides token P.J. O’Rourke, who panders to the Left with his attacks on Rush Limbaugh and conservative talk radio) get an equal opportunity to lampoon their political opponents on NPR airwaves?
What Ace wrote about the threats of violence or worse last week coming from the left and being directed towards specific, named individuals as opposed to somewhat amorphous political groups applies just about as well as their misogyny and bitter tone as well — better to leave us do our thing, lest this happen to you:
The left likes talking about particular people, making particularized threats, because you can’t really threaten an amorphous group like the Tea Party. Well, you can, but no particular person in the Tea Party will be strongly alarmed by the treat, being that it would be a generalized sort of blanket threat.But you can threaten individuals and penalize their participation in the political process by physically harming them, threatening such harm, or just conducting general terror campaigns against them. You only need to suggest the possibility of violence — or creepy, stalker-ish watching — to take away a person’s usual feeling of basic safety.
So I don’t think the Koch brothers are being attacked, personally, just to gin up counter-fundraising on the left. I think they’re being attacked, and threatened, in order to drive them from the public square entirely, and even more importantly, to let the next high-profile donor know in no uncertain terms: This could happen to you.
Maybe it’s just best to let liberals get their way, eh? Otherwise — shame if something happened.
And based on the above incident, this bumper sticker message is still very much in force.
Incidentally, Michelle has more on the status of her missing cousin, on her blog, and a new Website she established, www.findmarizela.com.
Say NPR, how ’bout mentioning that URL on the air and on your Website to make amends?
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