Enough with the Free Speech Thing Already

Hating to pay even meager additional attention to the Magilla from Wasilla that is Sarah (sigh) Palin, it has now become impossible not to comment on her latest, and perhaps most egregious misapplication of the notion of "freedom" since she burst upon us fully formed as the elderly McCain's doomed VP choice.

We won't spend a minute talking about the Tragedy in Tucson, since we can add nothing to the discussion not already said.

But we will talk about the notion of what "freedom of speech" really means, and why Palin and everyone who has ever invoked "free speech" when stung by criticism, has it all backwards. As a case in point, the bespectacled Palin, in a wanna-be-Presidential moment, took to the viral-video-sphere with a Tucson-inspired diatribe about how people who criticize her are somehow invading her right as a citizen to speak out.

Gag me, as was once upon a time asserted quite effectively, with a spoon.

Here is the news:

The constitutional notion of freedom of speech posits that the government can make no law preventing free expression of ideas.

And that's it.

If people don't like what you say, if people criticize you, if your words make them angry and not want to vote for you, if they call you names and find you tacky--too bad. In no way does "freedom of speech" ever, ever mean "freedom from criticism by other citizens". When your words are criticized, that is a function of OTHER PEOPLE exercizing their right to free speech. No amount of opprobrium from others who disagree with you can ever amount to an abrogation of your free speech rights.

"Freedom of Speech" means only this: that the government can make no law restricting it.

Get used to it, Ms. Palin, and stop being a crybaby.

The Real Tragedy of 2012

No, I am not predicting a Palin Presidency in the last year of the Mayan calendar.

Nor am I predicting that the tetrahedral energy fields inside the earth must realign in a couple of years, yanking as it were the tablecloth from underneath every living thing and every building and every mountain on the surface. And I'm not suggesting, either, the way a show called "2012: Shocking Secrets" (Syfy Channel) did, that there just may be an ancient archive beneath a certain random patch of sand in Egypt that would contain an Atlantean-inspired labyrinth structured in a manner to help us understand how to survive cataclysms--if only we could just find any evidence of it!

What I am saying is that if there's ever a time when the cranks and simpletons turn out to be right, and that if it ever comes in the form of any sort of Armageddon that will prevent these paranoid, doom-obsessed oafs from ever having to go to those stupid jobs of theirs ever again, and if these oafs have succeeded in surviving the worldwide catastrophe by hunkering down inside an old missile silo (growing food and raising animals down there), then the tragedy for us all is that the genetic material passed on to the next round of human unfortunates will be of suspect quality indeed.

And perhaps this is why humanity has never progressed all that far in certain respects: because all the smart people are too busy studying the genome or writing great plays or building clever code bases for gaming devices while the very dumbest and most paranoid members of humanity are obsessed with locating bunkers where they might survive when the comet hits. And perhaps this has happened a few times over the course of the last few hundred thousand years (roughly as far back as when the first homos erectus apparently daubed paint on the walls of caves and made nightstands out of bear-skulls).

Perhaps the myths about prior golden ages are true--Atlantis, Mu, Lemuria, Middle Earth, the American 1950s--and what happened was that each was struck down by catastrophe but that all the musicians and teachers were killed in their conservatories while just a few cranks and oafs and ancient-text-thumpers were dumb enough to have spent their lives building underground shelters and also far too dumb to have recognized they ought to have preserved a few books for the edification of the new races of man that would succeed them.

It certainly seems possible today that the half-literate yoyos stockpiling generators, fuel and generic canned goods may, if they are lucky, survive the imminent flipping of the magnetic poles, or the arrival of Planet X (that will tear away large portions of the Earth); but they will have forgotten to preserve Mozart or Lou Reed or Thomas Mann or McSweeney's and certainly not the means to create microchips, and so in a hundred thousand years when the great cities are rebuilt, those future humans will look back and wonder how those dopey men and women of eons past could have gotten along for so very many centuries without having developed any meaningful culture at all.

Isn't that what we wonder today? Do we not try to puzzle out how men and women lived for two hundred and ninety-thousand years before anyone bothered to write anything down, and how culture seemed to arrive already in full flower? Is it possible that, say, a hundred thousand years ago there were some yobs building an underground haven to protect themselves from tetrahedral realignment, and that they alone survived but were kind of like the vapid cranks doing the same thing today and therefore would have been too stupid to have gotten access to and protected the magic crystals that provided free energy to all ancient races?

That prospect is the looming tragedy of 2012. Unless by some cruel twist of fate we get stuck with Sarah Palin as President, in which case all bets will be off.

I was a Deluded Liberal

The tiny elections held last night loom large in the reconstruction of the Republican party even as the tiniest election of them all, in upstate New York, threaten to keep it confused and hobbled by divisive internal attacks from Valkyries like Sarah Palin. She and Dick Armey and the Teabagger Militia rolled in behind an ultra-conservative against a moderate Republican and thereby handed the long-red district to the blues.

But for Democrats, last night was, I believe, a watershed of a different type. For me, anyway, it proved that Obama has waited too long to put his positive stamp on the country; has deferred too much to others; has simply not been the bold leader many had hoped he'd be. And now I think he has let the GOP, which had been flat on its back in the first row of seats like a wrestler hove out of the ring, climb back between the ropes bloodied but eager (and strong enough) for a fight.

Let us review for a moment the health care issue. Perhaps it wasn't obvious until right now that the thing ought to have been wrapped up and delivered before the election. The message moderates will take from the pair of big GOP gubernatorial victories is that Obama may not be magical after all; and that they need not support him on health reform. I could be wrong, but I think Obama has let the moment pass. Thanks to his pusillanimous fellow Dems in the Senate (especially the no-account Harry Reid) and thanks even more to the ever-perfidious Lieberman (who seems perversely to enjoy ruining any laudable cause he can influence), I think health care is going to be lost like a ship foundering in heavy seas, and that reform will be found only in Davey Jones' locker.

Let us now review New Jersey if we must. What gave the Democrats the idea they could win with a guy from Goldman Sachs who talks like an undertaker and doesn't know how to tie on a seat belt at high speed? Corzine stank of all that stinks in this land--the cynical manipulation of events with mountains of ill-gotten cash--and the voters went for the Other Guy, who happens to be a member of the Party of Limbaugh. Nice going, Dems.

Finally let us review Afghanistan. The right thing is to get us the hell out of that historical destroyer of empires. How many times does a person have to see "The Man Who Would Be King" before he realizes Afghanistan is a lose-lose proposition? And yet we waste blood and treasure there as if bin Laden were somehow just down the next street awaiting capture. I know Obama never said he wanted out of Central Asia. But so what? Afghanistan only adds to the sense that the extremely historic election in 2008 has resulted in nothing of great note on the ground. And lets just not talk about Iraq for now.

Sure, the stimulus has worked somewhat. Sure, there's lip service and some progress on some fronts (gay rights, energy independence); but any garden variety Democrat could have done as much.

Maybe Obama needed a wake up call. It's just that I'm not sure I know who he is right now, and what he'll do once he wakes up.