I was snoozing in bed this morning while NPR's Morning Edition was on when I was jolted awake by Cokie Roberts. What she said was so slanted that I went and found it on the NPR website and played it back just to make sure I really heard her. You can hear it at
http://www.npr.org/...
She was discussing how the Democrats and the Republicans are working to fire up their respective bases. It is so important to Cokie to have "balanced" coverage that she compares completely unequal events to make her point.
She played a clip of former President Clinton in his interview with Chris Wallace about why he failed to catch Bin Laden. Clinton said,
You did a nice little hit job on me...It was a perfectly legitimate question, but what I want to know is how many people in the Bush administration you asked this question of.
Wouldn't it be nice if Cokie had considered his question? But that was not her point. She said,
The Democratic base completely agrees with former President Clinton that there is a right wing conservative conspiracy out there particularly when it comes to the media, particularly Fox News. So the former president probably really helped Democratic candidates by energizing the base yesterday in that appearance.
Firing up the Democratic base is nice but I honestly would rather have Chris Wallace ask the Bush administration why they have failed to catch Bin Laden.
Cokie then went on to talk about how Rev. Jerry Falwel is firing up the Republican base by recently comparing Hilary Clinton to Lucifer. Ad hominem attacks are just the same (in her argument) as asking national journalists whether they are doing their job or not. Please!