The fallout continues from NPR’s decision to fire news analyst Juan Williams for admitting on The O’Reilly Factor that he gets a little a nervous when a group of Muslims board an airliner he is flying on.

Whether his feelings are right or wrong, he’s certainly not alone in having them and a consensus appears to be forming on both the right and left that what he said was far from hate speech and that NPR overreacted. 

Here’s Whoopi Goldberg and the women of The View in a moment of rare agreement with Bill O’Reilly. And there was still more dissension regarding NPR’s intolerant decision on MSNBC where Morning Joe took the (partially) publicly-funded radio network to task. 

In an an unrelated matter (though not totally), Daily Show host Jon Stewart appeared on Larry King Live where he chastised CNN for canning Rick Sanchez over inappropriate (and somewhat nasty) remarks made on a SiriusXM radio show about Stewart and Jews in the media.

Unlike Sanchez’s controversial statements, it should be noted that Williams’ remarks were not nasty and, in context, were actually spoken in opposition to anti-Muslim bigotry — but Stewart’s point is classy and well taken. And he’s right.

It really is about time we stop destroying people’s careers for straying outside politically-correct boundaries and declaring virtually everyone with which we disagree to be guilty of hate speech.

With NPR’s Juan Williams scandal (and that’s what it is) a light bulb seems to have suddenly been flicked on allowing everyone (no matter one’s political leanings) to see a scary truth about the road we are on. If Juan Williams, a moderate liberal, can be marginalized as a hater or, as NPR CEO Vivian Schiller suggested, a mentally-unbalanced publicity hound (she later publicly apologized), it’s a very dangerous road indeed.

Fortunately, Williams as landed on his feet (thanks to a new deal with Fox News) and, hopefully, Sanchez will too.

Political correctness may have finally jumped the shark. As Williams says in his op-ed piece on the subject, no one should be fired for being honest.

BTW, here’s a portion of that op-ed piece I found particularly interesting:

“Years ago NPR tried to stop me from going on “The Factor.” When I refused they
insisted that I not identify myself as an NPR journalist. I asked them if they
thought people did not know where I appeared on the air as a daily talk show
host, national correspondent and news analyst. They refused to
budge.
 
This self-reverential attitude was on display several years ago
when NPR asked me to help them get an interview with President George W. Bush. I
have longstanding relationships with some of the key players in his White House
due to my years as a political writer at The Washington Post. When I got the
interview some in management expressed anger that in the course of the interview
I said to the president that Americans pray for him but don’t understand some of
his actions. They said it was wrong to say Americans pray for him.“

It was wrong to suggest Americans prayed for President Bush? If that’s accurate (and I, personally, don’t doubt it) you really have to wonder what’s going on in these people’s heads.