The Right's Right To Whine

By Cernig How predicatably hypocritical was it that, after all the rightwing crap about not giving a platform to an enabler of terror at Columbia, the folks creating most of the word count of commentary on Ahmin-nutjob's speech there are those self-same rightwingers? Earlier today, Ezra asked the obvious question: When did America become so weak, so insecure, that we mistrust our capacity to converse with potentially hostile world leaders? Do we really believe the president of Columbia is so doltish as to be outsmarted by a former traffic engineer from Tehran? Do we really see no utility in publicly grilling prominent liars in such a way that their denials lose credibility? What do we have to lose from a foreign leader, even a hostile one, somberly laying a wreath at the site of a tragedy? When did we become so afraid? And over at Blah3, Stranger provided the obvious answer. Because "Bush, his thugs, and the dwindling group of people who slavishly support him work from a well-known modus operandi - they'll go to great lengths to attack those who disagree with them on any point, no matter how small." Free speech is, in the winger mind, the right for the Right to be unchallenged and everyone else to be shouted down or pre-emptively silenced. That is simply the kind of totalitarianism Iran practises, in its infancy.