What should I find on Facebook early today but this? Ah, the smell of troll in the morning!
I know, that’s some tiny print. Here’s what it says:
The Republican Party have sent me their 2011 Congressional District Census. It’s a checkbox response format, thankfully with an <Other> option, since a lot of my choices have not been included. For example — ‘what is your primary news source’, and NPR is not listed. I shall have to add it!
The guy who posted this is a friend, so I asked him to send me a copy of the census question about primary news sources. And here it is:
That one, I trust, you can read. I don’t interpret it quite the way my friend does — all forms of radio are grouped into one entity, which I suppose is legit — but I do see his point. The GOP census doesn’t group all forms of TV into one, does it? No, it separates out the major networks (NBC/CBS/ABC), the cable news channels the right always labels as “leftist” (CNN/MSNBC), and then singles out their own GOP propaganda cable channel, Fox News. So why not a similar specificity with regard to radio? And why did they leave out the Comedy Channel? Don’t the hipsters get all their news from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert?
NPR is, like it or not, a major news source in the USA. I have no idea how many people get all their news from NPR, but it is at least a very significant percentage of the adult population. Perhaps the GOP doesn’t want to know — or worse, they automatically interpret a check in the “radio” box as meaning right wing AM hate radio, and don’t even consider the possibility that a Republican respondent might listen to NPR.
I remember a guy climbing into my VA hospital van for a ride to Phoenix one morning and immediately asking me to change the radio from NPR to Rush Limbaugh. I said no, I wasn’t going to listen to any Ku Klux Klanner in my van, and left NPR on. The guy grumbled all the way to Phoenix, complaining about NPR’s “leftist agenda.” This in spite of the fact that we were listening to Morning Edition, a straight news show with no apparent political bias. And if NPR does have a political bias these days, it is to the right, not the left. We lefties say that NPR stands for Nice Polite Republicans.
But let’s get to the comment below my friend’s Facebook entry. This one’s even harder to read. Here’s what it says:
At least you can listen to both extremes if you want … Rush and NPR. 😉
I admit it, I bit on the troll bait. Talk about a false equivalency, Rush and NPR. NPR is a one-man show put on by a bloated hippie drug addict with a deep-seated hatred of white people? What?
This is why you don’t get into arguments with right wingers. They are stupid. They don’t recognize reality. Rules of logic do not apply. They try to color everything black or white. Anyone who disagrees with them, not matter how slightly, is the enemy. I knew all this when I responded, but I did it anyway. It went like this:
Me: What’s with this false equivalency between Limbaugh and NPR? why do right wingers do that?
Him: Hahahaha! Calling me a “right winger” is pretty darned funny.
Me: It was the more polite of two choices.
The thread went on and on, but with no more input from me. Like I said, I should know better.