There's a lot of good stuff out there about how the James O'Keefe "stings" are bullshit. And about how remarkable it is that it took Glenn Beck flunkies to accomplish something NPR wouldn't dare attempt, namely, stick up for NPR.
But there is another level here that's worth peeling back.
The most bizarre aspect of this wingnut "sting" is its intended "gotcha." What the wingnuts thought they would be able to "prove" is that NPR is a biased socialist left-wing organization that would be thrilled to spread Islamist propaganda for a hefty paycheck.
What got the NPR executives fired was their alleged meanie comments about the Teabaggers being racists.
But the O'Keefe ratfuckers did not set this up in order to "bust" NPR executives as media moguls who do not like conservatives.
No, they hypothesized that NPR executives would be delighted to take money from shadowy Muslims and use it to undermine American security.
In this they were proved decisively wrong, in that the NPR executives did not take the money.
Now, they ought to have conceded the failure of their hypothesis, of course; the headline at Big Stupid Journalism should have been "wow, I guess NPR is not a radical Muslim front group after all -- we checked!"
I mean, that's what the headline should have been, if the enterprise were at all honest.
Or else, not completely crazy.
As a matter of utterly banal fact, you would have to be a thoroughly demented ideologue to have listened to NPR over the past decade and to have believed based upon this experience that this organization is ideologically predisposed to propagandize in favor of powerful Muslim interests.
I mean holy shit that's wrong...
This is something we've been over in regards to the other recent O'Keefe "sting," of Planned Parenthood. That "sting" depended upon the right-wing fantasy that there exist extensive well-organized juvenile "sex-trafficking" rings, something that upon even cursory examination turns out to be utter crap.
What I'm getting at is that I don't think it is at all recognized the degree to which right-wing "ideas" are merely the emanations of a carefully constructed, internally coherent, yet deeply nonsensical folklore. It's a hothouse cargo cult that scavenges in plain sight, battening off frequent, generous Fox News airdrop cultivation.
What the O'Keefe "stings" should reveal, objectively, is that Matt Taibbi was far too kind to them, but basically correct: they have no capacity or desire to cope with empirical reality.
What the NPR response thus most profoundly reveals, as if we didn't know, is that our most distinguished media institutions are at best helpless in the face of a deliberate onslaught against empirical reality.
At worst?
Dolla dolla bill y'all.