One of the more irritating political controversies of recent vintage came a few months back, when National Public Radio fired commentator Juan WIlliams for saying one thing on NPR and contradictory things on Fox. (The stated reason was different, and rather lame.)

The impression Williams gave—accurately, I think—was that he was more interested in cashing checks from two ideologically different news outlets than in being consistent or accurate.

But his ouster sparked waves of righteous indignation from the right wing, who generally embrace a black man only when they can score points off liberals in doing so, and Williams became a media martyr. As James Rainey writes in the LA TImes, “it seems he became irresistible as a Fox contributor — worthy of a reported $2 million over three years — only when the network could present him as a living, breathing symbol of the radical perfidy of the left-wing media.”

Now he has written a “book” about the experience called “Muzzled: The Assault on Honest Debate.”

The title both bores and bothers: Now Williams is a self-proclaimed martyr, employing the loaded one-word book title of which Ann Coulter is so fond. Then there follows a subtitle so patently false—the implication, of course, being that there is some systemic liberal “assault” on “honest debate,” whatever that means—that one wants to run screaming into the desert.

Mr. Williams is a newspaper columnist—not a very good one—who has made millions of dollars by speaking on various television and radio channels (not very insightfully). He has, unfortunately, always been welcomed in both the liberal and the conservative media as a token African-American voice, because there aren’t a lot of those (African-American voices) in either the liberal or conservative press. But the truth is, he’s never been very good. (One strives to remember the memorable Juan Williams column.) He hasn’t been muzzled—he’s been boosted. Before his firing, it was excruciating to watch him on Fox, as he tried to bend and twist his orthodox liberalism to please his conservative cohorts. Now it is excruciating to watch him because one sees how his bitterness over being fired has caused him to leap into the arms of people who only want to use him for propaganda purposes. Careful never to rock the boat, his opinions sanitized to the point where it is hard to actually call them opinions, Williams is more muzzled being employed by Fox than he was being fired by NPR.

Williams talks in the book about what happened to him, of course, but as “Muzzled” (one really wants to add an explanation point, just to take the thing to its hysterical conclusion) insists, the book is about more than just him.

“We need to protect a free-flowing, respectful national conversation in our country,” he writes, asserting that “political correctness” makes that impossible.

Hmmm. Someone who takes millions from Rupert Murdoch talking about the need to protect respectful national conversation—what’s the word book title for that? Chutzpah!

(Oh, wait—someone already took that title.)

Rainey, who seems well-informed on the matter, provides some useful facts.

Williams had already become an ineffective and diminished figure at NPR well before the firing — a fact that got lost in all the hoo-hah last year. He would blame that on executives who thwarted him mostly, in his opinion, because of their displeasure that he had gone to work as a commentator for the conservative standard-bearer, Fox. He argues in “Muzzled” that NPR’s news bosses demanded liberal orthodoxy and wouldn’t tolerate dissent.

But many of his co-workers at the radio network had been displeased with Williams for some time. There were editors and reporters who didn’t like to work with him, because they felt he often wasn’t adequately prepared for the subjects of the day. Williams wanted to be more pundit than reporter, they believed, desiring to bring something like the wide-open rat-a-tat-tat of the cable bazaar to the staid academy that is public radio.

Some of Williams’ flights of fancy infuriated NPR co-workers and many listeners. When he misstated Gen. David Petraeus’ position on the possibility of sending U.S. troops to Iran, the military almost kicked NPR’s entire reporting team out of Iraq, even though Williams made the statement on Fox.

Williams couldn’t be reached for comment—the PR people at Fox wouldn’t let him speak. Muzzled!

Williams has, of course, been making the rounds to hock his book, and he’s been on lots of liberal/public radio programs. (Liberal guilt.)

As Rainey puts it (I like this James Rainey, he’s a nice writer)…

…He got a warm welcome this week from Stewart on the “Daily Show.” If Williams can be thus “Muzzled,” the man appealing for tolerance while starring on hyper-partisan Fox, let the year of the non sequitur reign.

Next up: Why Republicans who refuse to raise the debt ceiling are the party of fiscal conservatism.