Liberals Champion Freedom of Speech — Except in Politics
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on June 27th, 2014 11:08 pm by HL
Liberals Champion Freedom of Speech — Except in Politics
Michael Barone, RealClearPolitics
I’m old enough to remember when American liberals cherished the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. They celebrated especially the freedom accorded those with unpopular beliefs and protested attempts to squelch the expression of differing opinions. Today things are different. American liberals are not challenging the Supreme Court rulings extending First Amendment protection to nude dancers, flag burners and students wearing antiwar armbands. They are content to leave these as forms of protected free speech. But political speech is a whole other thing. Currently 43 Democratic…
Obama Hitting the Road on Female-Voter Empathy Tour
Alexis Simendinger, RealClearPolitics
President Obama has something on his mind — a message he plans to deliver in Minneapolis Thursday and Friday. It’s similar to an idea President George H.W. Bush shared in Pease, N.H., in January 1992. During a town-hall session — akin to the one Obama will hold in Minnesota this week — Bush said his White House mail helped him understand the worries of hardworking, everyday Americans. “Message: I care,” Bush said after answering questions about the economy, 35 million people without health coverage, and his efforts to be an “education president.” “When…
15 Most Annoying Expressions in Politics
Carl M. Cannon, RealClearPolitics
Irritating phrases and words are not confined to political circles, or solely to Washington, although here in the nation’s capital they burrow in and proliferate like obsolete, but entrenched, government programs. This is a call to arms to fight them—but only metaphorically. 15: “WAR ON [FILL IN THE BLANK]” Syria’s civil war has produced 2.5 million refugees and a death toll of 160,000, a tragedy that has galvanized neither major political party into action. So next time a Democrat brays about the so-called Republican “war on women” or a Republican…
Iraq and the Echoes of Vietnam
Steve Chapman, RealClearPolitics
A corrupt government that has alienated many of its people finds itself unable to overcome a growing insurgency in an endless civil war and expects a superpower on the other side of the globe to come to its rescue. That’s the story in Iraq today — which carries eerie echoes of the not-so-distant past. In June of 1964, as conditions deteriorated in South Vietnam, President Lyndon Johnson assured a journalist he was not about to get too far in or stay too far out. “We won’t abandon Saigon, and we don’t intend to send in U.S. troops,” he insisted. He was betting that U.S. military advisers…
