NPR's Inskeep: Bouquets for Maddow, Brickbats and Clichés for Goldberg

Five days after pushing back hard against National Review‘s Jonah Goldberg for his book contending that liberals impose a Tyranny of Clichés, National Public Radio Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep embraced MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and the anti-war arguments of her new book, Drift.

Here is how Inskeep attacked the central thesis of Goldberg’s book–ironically, invoking a well-worn liberal cliché:

INSKEEP: Well, let’s be fair. There are plenty of conservative labels that are applied on the rivals of conservatives. We could go back to the past administration: You’re with us or against us; are you with America, or are you with the other guys?

And here’s how Inskeep embraced Maddow’s argument–which is that U.S. military spending leads to American wars:

INSKEEP: Although [President] Jefferson is such a funny example to choose in this issue, because he was a big proponent of limited government, until he actually became president of the United States and then used a lot of power, including looking over and realizing he still had a Navy, and he sent it over to whack a bunch of Barbary pirates. I mean, he went to war.

Inskeep not only accepts the central premise of Maddow’s argument; he also takes it to an extreme, arguing that Thomas Jefferson only attacked the Barbary states because “he still had a Navy.” In fact, the Barbary pirates attacked Americans, not the other way around.

Like many on the left, Maddow sees the military as just one more example of a privileged institution subject to expropriation and redistribution for the benefit of a war on poverty that never ends, and an ineffective “war machine”–in the form of the state bureaucracy–that is never decommissioned.

But unlike NPR and Inskeep, she’s not trying to hide her bias.