Whip Lashed

In the car yesterday, I caught a story on Minnesota Public Radio that began with the news that Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty had "lashed out" at RNC protesters in an appearance on C-SPAN. Pawlenty lashing out? This I gotta hear, I thought.

You can listen to the Governor's vicious outburst for yourself here. A story on MPR's web site has the details:

Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty today told the C-SPAN cable network he celebrates protesters' First Amendment rights of free speech. But he says matters change when there is violence or property damage.

"Anytime you have an event like this you are going to attract protesters, and there is some subgroup of them who are going to be anarchists, or nihilists, or just goofballs -- and they are going to do bad things,", Pawlenty said.

"We enjoy and appreciate their First Amendment rights to shout, to yell, to hold signs. But once you start breaking stuff, once you start hurting someone else, once you start endangering others' property or lives, you don't get to do that," he continued.

"These are serious matters. It's not most of the protesters, it's a subgroup. They are just nutty I think, in my opinion, trying to hurt people, trying to break property and for that subgroup of protesters they need to be dealt with and arrested."

Goofballs? Can you say that on the radio?

Whoa. Who let this attack dog off his leash? Down T-Paw, down.

Once again, it's an example of how sometimes it's not what the media reports but how. By the way, I heard the same NPR news report on Sarah Palin today that Paul from Power Line did and I too was disgusted by its obvious bias. I can't recall EVER hearing a SINGLE such news item on NPR on EVEN ONE of Barack Obama's many policy flip flops.