Time for the latest edition of Adam Comments on What Everyone Else has Already Commented On.

You know Juan Williams of NPR? He got fired for saying, and I quote, "All Muslims are trying to kill us all the time, and I think we should just nuke the Middle East, gas chamber the shit out of Muslims, and live on in a peaceful world free of the Muslim scourge."

Or he might as well have, the way NPR's knee jerked him out of a job and into right-wing hero status. What he actually said was "Sure, when I see someone in Muslim garb on a plane, I get a little nervous, BUT OBVIOUSLY NOT ALL MUSLIMS ARE TERRORISTS."

It's just that the last little bit of information there was left off of basically all the reporting. This is similar to the Shirley Sherrod thing a while back when she got fired immediately after it was reported that she said she didn't help a white farmer because he was white. In that case, they left off the entire rest of her message, where she realized she was wrong for that, and used the story as a message of racial tolerance.

When I was a kid, I always thought it would be funny to edit together clips of people saying words and making them say ridiculous things. If you can find a clip of someone saying "I hate black licorice," and one of them saying "Hanukkah is a Jewish holiday," and one of them saying "People like to dance," you could make them say "I hate...Jewish...people." But now that this is ACTUALLY happening on the news, it's not nearly as funny.

Oftentimes to make a point in a debate, you have to show common ground with your opponent. I recently volunteered at a food bank, helping people get their government subsidized food to their cars. Right-wingers say government should not do this, and they often point to lazy minorities who have babies and collect government checks and don't look for work. Having seen what I saw, I would say "Yes, there are young minorities with six kids in tow picking up their free food, but the majority of these people were older, often foreign people who didn't save enough money or just need some help to get by, and I would hate to see these decent people punished because of a small number of government assistance abusers."

If that were shown on the news, my statement would be "There are minorities with six kids in tow picking up their free food."

This is not responsible journalism. I suppose there are a few hyper-enlightened individuals who can walk through the inner city past groups of dangerous looking teenagers without their heart rates increasing. I suppose there are a few people who, on September 13th, 2001, could get on an airplane with a Muslim guy and not think, "Well that's off-putting." But I'd wager that most of us are like Juan Williams. We can admit that, though it's wrong, we do have preconceived notions about people and things. His point was, though, that we can feel like that instinctively, but our rational brains can override those feelings.

NPR didn't think rationally, they just instinctively fired the guy for a misconstrued half-statement. For a news company that pretends to be the rational one, that move was not very impressive.