The Weasel Zippers catch a little “Taxpayer-funded weapons-grade liberal stupidity” from NPR host John Hockenberry:
(Daily Caller) — So what if the pre-2002 Taliban government of Afghanistan harbored terrorists that were responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. And never mind if more recently the Taliban reacted to the death of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden with a pair of suicide bombers – they’re not really our enemies.
That’s the takeaway from public radio host John Hockenberry, whose show “The Takeaway” appears on NPR stations all over the country.
In an interview with Christine Fair, assistant professor at the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., Hockenberry challenged the notion of the Taliban being an enemy of the United States and declared that the idea it could again make Afghanistan a haven for terrorists “an absurdity.”
“I guess, Christine Fair, I’m wondering why this is even a debate,” Hockenberry said. “The Taliban has never been an enemy of the United States. They don’t love us in Afghanistan, but they’re not sending planes over to New York or to the Pentagon and it seems to me much more broadly that the debate needs to happen is what is the sort of multi-state strategy for dealing with rogue nations of all kinds. Yemen is about to fall apart. You’ve got Somalia problems. The idea that terrorists just go to Afghanistan and launch weapons at the United States it seems in 2011 is an absurdity.”
For a time in late 1990s, when Keith Olbermann took his first sabbatical from MSNBC and returned to sportscasting, he was replaced by Hockenberry. A Media Research Center update written during the changeover highlighted some of Hockenberry’s more absurd positions:
Monday night the 8pm ET/PT hours on MSNBC become “Hockenberry,” a show hosted by John Hockenberry, once of NPR. The MRC’s Tim Graham reminded me of Hockenberry’s comments made during a March 2, 1995 session on America Online when he was with ABC News:
- “I think that capitalism is inherently amoral* and it is folly to expect that a system run on greed will be able to adopt some virtuous precepts to prevent the violations of human rights.”
- On Clinton’s re-election chances: “Faced with a choice of a crowd-pleasing fanatic trying to look like a Republican and about a hundred real Repubs it looks tough to me.”
- On whether the public is well informed: “I think American politics thrives on ignorance today. I think American policy works without a backup plan as long as people are so unrepentantly uninformed.”
NPR certainly has the right man to ensure that.
* Given his see-no-evil stance on the Taliban, he’s in rather interesting company here.
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