moosings 049 - toxic waste or “where has all the free speech gone? (long time passing)”
Categories: moosings
the moose looked up from his laptop…
“well, maybe he’s not as dead as i thought…”
“hunh?”
“of course, when bill o’reilly is the one to get it right…”
“ok, now i know you’ve slipped into the twilight zone… but you’re finally ready to talk about it?”
“well, i’m still pretty pissed about the whole thing, but yeah, i guess so…”
“ok, so then who are we talking about?’
“bill maher…”
“umm… yeah, i don’t remember even reading any rumors that he was dead…”
“well, i didn’t mean literally dead… it’s just after he got tossed from his abc show after the remarks he made about 911 i figured he was likely to be shut down again after last week…”
“oh? what happened?”
“well… actually, let’s back up a bit… you remember in last friday’s junkyard i had ya mention the uproar over obama’s comment about lives being “wasted” in iraq and the seemingly smaller furor when john mccain made a similar remark on letterman’s show?”
“yeah…”
“and of course it took next to no time for both of them to apologise for the remarks… obama saying it was a ‘slip of the tongue‘, and mccain saying he should have used the word ’sacrificed’ instead…”
“mmmhmmm…”
“but the thing is, that’s just the tip of the iceberg…”
“whatcha mean?”
“well, there was the fracas a few weeks back when david geffen, one of obama’s main fund raisers made some disparaging remarks about the clintons… hillary’s response? that obama should “immediately denounce these remarks, remove Mr. Geffen from his campaign and return his money”…
“yeah, i remember that…”
“then there was the flap over the bloggers that john edwards had hired to run his campaign blog… since she had, in the past, made rather scathing remarks about president w. and about religion, remarks that some labeled as ‘hate speech’ the question was raised whether by hiring her, edwards himself was condoning hate speech and what it said about him as a candidate… and, of course there were the calls for edwards to…”
“let me guess…”
“yep, you got it, denonunce and fire her… and though edwards did state that he was ‘personally offended’ by some of her statements, that didn’t quell the furor (with bill donohue, the president of the catholic league going so far as to call edwards ‘nothing more than david duke with a blow-dried haircut‘) until marcotte and another blogger finally quit in order to lessen the fire on the campaign…
“plus we’ve got the case of ann coulter all but calling john edwards a “faggot” at a recent conservative convention… to which joe solomonese, the president of the human rights campaign responded ‘We demand that every single Presidential candidate in attendance at this conference, along with Vice President Cheney stand up and publicly condemn this type of gutter-style politics’…
“wow…”
“yep… and then came word that after arianna huffington of the huffington post linked to a story on the possible assassination attempt of vice w. dick cheney, comments that were made on the post stating that it was a shame that the attempt hadn’t succeeded were subsequently removed and some posters banned from the site… a charge that arianna not only didn’t deny but defended as the right thing to do, saying that the posts were ‘unacceptable and were treated as such by being removed’…
“and ulitmately that’s what led to the flap on maher’s show…
“how so?”
“well, bill and his panelists were having a discussion over the obama/mccain remarks and the huffington posts, with bill taking the position that america was becoming not unlike china where thoughts and comments that were ‘unacceptable’ were routinely censored or condemned, as opposed to the supposed ideal of free speech that is supposed to prevail in our country…
“i’ll be honest, when i watched the show i was incredibly taken aback not by bill’s comments, but by the fact that his panel, which included a correspondent from npr, msnbc’s keith olbermann, and representative barney frank were saying that it was right for these people to recant their words and do the politically expedient thing, no matter what they might actually think…
“it’s the kind of thing that makes me think that free speech in this country really is basically dead… “
“ummm… don’t you think that’s going a bit too far?”
“nope, not at all… i mean look what happened next… in defending the right of obama and mccain to say what they really felt without backing down, and of the huffington commenters to have their say without their comments being censored, maher went on to say that ‘I have zero doubt that if Dick Cheney was not in power people wouldn’t be dying needlessly tomorrow. If he did die, other people — more people would live. That’s a fact.’… so what did the commentators pick up on the next day? did the headlines say ‘maher defends free speech’ or even ‘maher condemns censorship, compares america to red china’?”
“ummm… i’m guessing no…”
“nope, instead they were blaring things like ‘bill maher sorry the assassination attempt on dick cheney failed‘ and ‘bill maher wishes for assassination of dick cheney‘ either completely ignoring the context of the remarks or taking them so far out of context that they had nothing to do with what he was actually saying… and that’s why i figured he was probably dead in the water with his show… fortunately, i suspect the scooter libby trial verdict managed to distract enough of the right wingers that they didn’t have enough energy left to really mount a strong attack on him…
“nonetheless, the fact remains that maher was right… people, and most of all our political leaders SHOULD be able to say what they think, to express their feelings without fear of political reprisals… and more than that, if they really want to be the leaders of our country, they should have the balls to do just that… if obama and mccain feel that lives are being wasted in iraq, then not only should they be able to say so, they should be encouraged to… whether it’s going to be used against them or not… because if their too worried about their political futures to say what they actually think, how are they going to be when it comes to governing?
“in a lot of ways this goes back to what i was saying a couple of weeks ago about rush limbaugh having the right to make an ass of himself on his radio show if he wants to…
“and then they should have the guts to stand behind their words… as a matter of fact, that’s what we’re calling on them to do now… from now on, if john mccain thinks lives are being wasted in iraq, we call on him to live up to his earlier ’straight talk express’ concept and say so… and the same comes for obama… and if arianna huffington doesn’t agree with thoughts expressed on her blog then she should say so… but she shouldn’t try to make it look like those thoughts were never uttered… and if ann coulter thinks john edwards is a faggot then… well, she actually pretty much did say it, but we also call on her to stand behind her words… and if bill maher thinks the world would be better off without dick cheney, then he should not only say it but stand behind those words, too… and at the same time, we call upon their opponents to not take their words out of context in order simply to make them look bad… if you want to disagree with what they say, fine, but you are not allowed to twist their words out of context so that they eventually look nothing like what was actually uttered…
“because its only then, when we’ve actually regained some level of actual discourse and debate in this country, when we can actually express real ideas instead of simply looking for someone to put their foot in their mouth or say something we can use against them that we’ll actually start moving forward again in this country and that real progress will be made… until then we’re just going to be sniping at each other without actually accomplishing anything…
“wishful thinking pie in the sky? maybe… but it’s a pie i’d love to try… especially as we’re supposed to be choosing the person who’s going to lead us out of this current mess and into the future…”
“me, too…”
(by the way, and for the record, the moose would like to say that he doesn’t wish president w., dick cheney, or any other member of the current administration dead… he’d much rather see them alive, but out of office and on trial for war crimes, ignoring the geneva conventions, and abrogating the constitution… or as president w. likes to call it that “goddamned piece of paper“…)
(oh, and this just in… apparently the people of vermont agree with the moose… at least on the out of office part…)
7 Responses to “moosings 049 - toxic waste or “where has all the free speech gone? (long time passing)””
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DamnSquirrel Says:
March 8th, 2007 at 9:31 pmOh. Wow. I’m… O’Reilly? Could that article be … erm… fiction?
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DamnSquirrel Says:
March 8th, 2007 at 11:00 pmBTW, Moose, we expected to find at least a small nod to the passing of Steve Rogers today. Surely you have something to say on Cap’s farewell…
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Shan Says:
March 9th, 2007 at 10:41 amMoose & Co–
I’ve been thinking about free speech lately, but not with regard to the contemporary American scene with its politicoes speaking out of two sides of their mouths and its so-called journalists and political critics too scared to speak out at all. Instead, I’ve been thinking about the time of the Renaissance and Reformation in Western Europe, when saying something critical about the powers-that-were could land you in a flaming pile of faggots (for you folks out there interested in censoring me, let me remind you that, in the Reformation, the faggot was the bundle of sticks used to light on fire the day’s heretics–a group which also could include gay or lesbian persons whose lifestyles were considered heretical by the church and society, which gives us today’s frequently-used negative connotation of the word).
Back then, in 1550 or 1660, people used colorful, strong language to make strong, critical points, and they usually didn’t back down from it except under the most extreme physical torture. Even the venerated Martin Luther, whom throngs of evangelical Christian Americans claim as their own spiritual forefather, let loose some wild epithets against his opponents in the service of his theological revolution. The way esteemed theologians and clerics got their points across in that time period was to lambaste each other using creative wordplay on each other’s names or personal habits in order to prove their linguistic abilities and to get attention for their causes; this was the human equivalent of the gorilla beating his chest and letting out a huge roar to let everyone in the vicinity know who is king.
Often, the writing and speaking of these Reformation theologians got them in a heap of trouble, resulting in their imprisonment and torture by order of the princes of the realm and/or by the church; sometimes, it resulted in death by burning at the stake or being run through with a sword or some other, equally grisly form of public execution. Unlike politicians and preachers these days, those men (and sometimes women) were willing to lay down their lives (or at least suffer physical deprivation and pain) for what they believed because they thought some greater good would come of it. I’m not saying these people were perfect–they were not, and they often said stuff that should have been left unsaid, including anti-Semitic rants; however, I admire their efforts to make a space for speech even when the powers-that-were gave them very little. It is through their efforts to speak their consciences that we have inherited what became the right to free speech that we seem to be letting slip through our hands here in the US these days.
I guess my last point is this: negative speech, ad hominem attacks, strong language–all of these have been part of the Western heritage of politics for a long, long time. Despite the fact that many of us want our politicians to “make nice” and refrain from saying or doing anything mean or ugly, the reality is that politics is NOT nice or pretty or pleasant, and to pretend it is, only sends the ugliness into hiding where we voters cannot see it. This is part of the reason the Bush administration has been successful–they have given the public what we wanted to see, which was a guy we’d like to have over for a beer on the back porch, and they have done much of the dirty stuff behind closed doors–including making war. They have made policies to hide all that unsavory stuff that gets said and done in the political machine, and enough of the public has bought into this vision, a distorted one, to keep the Bush administration in power.
Unfortunately, to work this way, the administration has also had to cultivate a climate of fear in which its critics cower and recant when accused of being un-American or going too far against Bush/Cheney’s public line; and the public has tolerated, if not encouraged, the fear-mongering. The result is that people who are NOT at risk of being burned at the stake for their ideas and criticisms are willingly backing down in order to keep their jobs. In kowtowing to the administration or to public censorship, we are giving up a right that others have died in the service of for, but, to our shame, it is to protect our own jobs, our own asses, instead of trying to do something to benefit the greater society. We are giving away so much more for so much less.
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durnmoose Says:
March 9th, 2007 at 12:18 pmdamnsquirrel: check out today’s moosing for our take on cap’s death… and check out this link http://www.theconservativevoice.com/article/23328.html for a rather disturbing take on the whole thing…
oh, and cap was also featured on steven colbert’s show last night, especially “the word”… you can find it here: http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/?ml_video=83437
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durnmoose Says:
March 9th, 2007 at 12:21 pmshan:
“We are giving away so much more for so much less.”
so true…
le sigh…
thank you, btw, for the insightful comments…
da moose…
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the chat Says:
March 9th, 2007 at 1:19 pmI’ve started to respond to this 5 times, and each time it gets to be an essay more than a response … so, I’m going to keep it short by agreeing with former NY Gov. Mario Cuomo who said, “We campaign in poetry and govern in prose” in response to the back and forth between the candidates.
To add to what Shan so eloquently says above, I think another huge factor in all this is corporate ownership of media. I still can’t figure out what people are referring to when they say “mainstream media” b/c I really think msm went on life support in the mid-80’s and had the plug pulled by the end of that decade. Instead of real news that truly affects the mainstream, what we have now is one big corporate newsletter. It’s irrelevant which side (Dem/Rep; Conservative/Liberal) is being vilified. It works because we let it work. What’s the answer? I’m not sure, but I think participating in blogs, voting, and refusing to allow myself to be manipulated by corporate schmoes might be a start.
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durnmoose Says:
March 9th, 2007 at 8:51 pmchat, you know we’ve got no issue with essays (heck, just see shan’s post above) so don’t feel any need to “keep it short”… of course, if you really want to write a front-page essay on the topic (or any other it inspires) you can feel free to do THAT, too…
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