When North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue quipped that “I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won’t hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover,” the head of NewsBusters’ Tom Blumer exploded. He howled in a Sept. 27 post:
Someone should ask Ms. Perdue to demonstrate the “funny” vocal inflections and other “joking” mannerisms she used to deliver yuks to her Rotary Club audience. If there’s a way to make such a statement funny, I want to hear it. I say it doesn’t exist.
And when the Raleigh News & Observer reported that it was a joke, Blumer howled even more:
Look, RN&O, you don’t have to be a Republican, or independent, or moderate, or even an eeeeeeevil Tea Party sympathizer to take such a statement seriously. Why, even some (but sadly not all) liberals will have a problem with this.
Did Blumer have any evidence that Perdue’s statement was meant to be taken seriously? Of course not. Still, insisted that Perdue was “obviously serious.”
Blumer kept up the outrage the next day, onec again asserting that “There is no chance that North Carolina Governor Beverly Perdue was ‘joking’ — not even in a Steven Wright sense” — again, with absolutely no evidence to back it up — and personally attacking the newspaper reporter who called it a joke, then attacked another reporter who tried to defend the paper:
Sorry, John. No sale. If there were no bias, “joke” would have been in quotes. It wasn’t.
Because it wasn’t, a typical reader would take it to mean that it really was a joke. It wasn’t.
If you meant to communicate that Perdue or her peeps thought it was a joke, you would have put “joke” in quotes. You didn’t.
Again, Blumer has no evidence beyond what he has made up inside his own fevered brain that Perdue was not joking. He has simply decided that.
This is all very funny and hypocritical because we searched both the NewsBusters and MRC a rchives and find no mention, let alone freakout, over President Bush’s 2000 statement, “If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator.”
If anyone at the MRC was bothered by Bush’s expression in favor of a dictatorship, joking or not, they weren’t so bothered to write about it or even defend it from criticism.
Apparently, Blumer and the MRC wouldn’t mind such violations of rights as long as it was a Republican who did the violating.