The Day I Stood Up To NPR

There's an article in Time about bomb-throwing Republican senators Tom Coburn and Jim DeMint who take a lot of symbolic stands against spending. What makes them particularly annoying to other senators is that hold up legislation by refusing to join in the "unanimous consent" resolutions that allow a lot of routing legislation to get passed.

I'm sure they'll both be heroes to the right-wing because the Bush administration has shown that the right would rather throw impotent bombs than actually grow up and govern.

But I won't be too hard on Cobern and DeMint.

I've done the same thing.

When I was in faculty senate long ago, the chair was trying to get a motion passed unanimously to re-authorize $100,000 in funding to get NPR for our campus radio station.

But I can't stand NPR and thought that the campus radio station was pointless for students because it played classical music all day.

So I stonewalled, making several medium-length speeches characterizing NPR reporting as mass media "cliches in depth" and the general NPR approach as "popular culture for people who are too good for popular culture." The university had just downgraded it's football program from scholarship to non-scholarship because of lack of student interest. I argued that students were just as uninterested in NPR. I should have said that students were even less interested.

But the vote was 33-1 and I was the one. Even the token right-wingers supported the resolution because they didn't want to make tenured faculty mad at them. They were certainly mad at me and I was very much untenured.

But they didn't get their unanimous vote either.

Actually, the Senate Democrats could use a few bomb throwers besides Russ Feingold.