As you can see in the previous post, I appeared this morning on Fox News and, completely independent of my brief interaction with Christopher Hitchens there, was pleased to have done my small part for our First Amendment freedoms, appearing on a network that the president is actually trying to shut out of the political discussion.
In the narrative that Obama is telling himself, Fox News is the Death Star, and he is the heroic X-Wing fighter guy, here to do the deed and save the future for the rest of us. In actual fact, he is a thin-skinned politician who takes any level of disagreement whatever as a sign that someone is borderline seditious, and over the line delusional.
But the thing that is so odd about these sorts of kerfluffles is how it illustrates how completely jaded and cynical and clueless our purported guardians of free political speech are. If a teenager in Lubbock, Texas were to wear a T-shirt inviting his English teacher to commit an unnatural sex act, and he is told by the school administrators to go home and change his shirt, the ACLU would be right there, protecting the “right to free speech.” If someone suggests that we cut taxpayer funding for outrageous art exhibits, then we are informed instanter that freedom of expression is in peril. These First Amendment rabbit trails are just that, rabbit trails, and we can tell that we have got off the point just as soon as real threats to the kind of speech that the First Amendment intended to protect present themselves — political criticism of incumbents, for starters. The silence is incredible. John McCain co-sponsored a bill restricting political speech in the proximity of any event where such speech might matter, viz. elections, and what happened? The Republicans nominated him to be their guy. And now the Prophet Obama wants to silence the heretics over at Fox News? The thing that astonishes here is why critics of the whole Fox News approach (and I would be one) aren’t defending (to the death) the Fox right to say it. Why isn’t the ACLU holding press conferences, telling the president to knock it off with the chilling effect that we used to hear so much about? Three guesses.