Control freak speech police

Daniel Henninger:

In an interview in yesterday's Washington Post, Hillary Clinton said she had contributed to the country's mood of bitter partisanship and wants to "put an end to it." The senator hedged her words for future revision by referring to the problem throughout the interview only as "it."

Thus, she spoke of "having gone through it, having been on the receiving end of it and in campaigns that were hard fought maybe on the giving end of it . . ." When the reporters pressed her to explain her views on polarization, she said: "I've talked about it a lot, and I think I will continue to talk about it in a lot of different ways."

It's a start. I would like to put a question to the senator: Would you defend Rush Limbaugh's speech rights against the pressure that was brought upon him on the floor of the Senate by your colleagues Harry Reid and Ken Salazar? Colorado's Sen. Salazar went so far last week as to say he'd support a Senate vote to "censure" Mr. Limbaugh. Rhymes with censor.

When Sen. Reid attacked Mr. Limbaugh on the floor of the Senate, some felt that Mr. Limbaugh was a big boy and perfectly capable of defending himself. I'm not so sure. If Mr. Limbaugh and his critics at Media Matters want to have a street fight, that's their business. But Sens. Reid and Salazar aren't just a couple of opinionated guys; they are agents of state authority, and they were leaning hard on Mr. Limbaugh. If you are Media Matters, if you are a man or woman of the Left, does state pressure on someone's political speech discomfort you? Or is it a welcome, even defensible, repression of harmful right-wing speech?

This controversy over talk-show hosts is usually fought around Democratic efforts of late to resurrect the Fairness Doctrine. The purpose of this effort--the reason Sen. Reid has attached himself to it--is to suppress voter turnout on the right and lift it on the left.

Political talk-radio since its inception has energized voters on the right. In the 2000 presidential election, the left found its own voter-turnout instrument in Howard Dean's Web-based "netroots," now led by MoveOn.org and other leftwing or "progressive" sites such as Daily Kos and Media Matters.

Some of the left-wing sites, however, also do fund raising and political organizing, as in the netroots campaigns against Democratic politicians who didn't hear that dissent is dead. Talk radio does neither. Its hosts mainly excite people. Reimposing the Fairness Doctrine, essentially a toxic cocktail of boredom, would cause a narcotized right-wing base to sit on its hands, handing an advantage in the turnout wars to the (properly) unregulated political organizers of the left-wing Web.

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It's not enough to disagree with conservative viewpoints; one has to undermine and delegitimize them. Mock them. Put them beyond the pale. Incidentally, Marcuse, Fish and others on the left who want to "withdraw" tolerance from the speech and ideas of their opponents count centrist Democrats among them. That is what happened to Joe Lieberman.

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It is not what Limbaugh projects that is so offensive to the left it is what he does to shoot down their projections that really offends them. In reality Limbaugh is basically reactive. He plays off of things liberals say and do and presents arguments against them. This make sit difficult for them to sustain attacks and sustain arguments. In the past a point of view would become part of the media story line and would eventually become accepted wisdom.

Now Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives have a medium for presenting the other side to the liberal story lien and some of them quickly fade. Even their tactic of presenting "unassailable" witnesses such as a 12 year old kid have been subjected to reasoned argument. The liberals are struggling with their loss of control of the narrative and are fighting back, not with reasoned argument but with attempt to suppress the arguments of their opponents. It is part of their fear of freedom for others.

If Democrats somehow, were able to legislate Limbaugh's show off the AM dial, it would resurface on satellite radio and make that medium the success that AM has become since he re energized it, and they would at the same time doom the AM stations to oblivion. I think the owners of those stations would resist that change.

Power Line has more on the "Crush Rush Democrats."