Corporate pimp James O'Keefe, whose lies might give the Republicans the excuse they want to de-fund NPR.

Scenario one: A conservative governor gets on the phone with a person he believes is a big corporate supporter and brags about how he will bust the unions. They essentially make plans for the corporate takeover of the state. People get angry, but he doesn’t have to resign because he knows it will blow over.

Scenario two: The head of a public broadcasting group talks to a fake Muslim fake donor and NPR could lose its federal funding.

So what’s the difference here? Maybe it’s that liberals have a sense of shame. It’s possible to embarrass us.

But the key here is that the videos here involved the fake pimp whose videos gave the Republicans an excuse to shut down ACORN, one of the most effective voter-registration groups in the nation.

James O’Keefe, a true pimp for corporate interests, devised a fake Muslim group that offered $5 million to NPR.  Executives at the broadcasting company never intended to take the money and actually questioned the tax-exempt status of the group. But the willing right-wing media made a big deal out of it, just as they did the fake pimp videos. It proves NPR has a liberal bias.

It’s OK for Fox News to be the mouthpiece of the right, but it’s not OK to have a news organization that broadcasts real truth. Even the supposed “liberal” media jump all over it, believing the right-wing hype to be real news because “people are talking about it,” as a former editor of mine once put it.

Of course people are talking about it. If you put it out there again and again, people will talk about it, just like they talk about Charlie Sheen. It’s a perfect shiny issue. “Don’t look at the rape of American workers, look over here; this is shiny.”

It’s a double standard, pure and simple, and it threatens to take down our Democracy.