Free speech takes a licking
By Wes Pruden
PreudenPolitics.com
President Obama and his men (and particularly his
women) are having a tough time standing upright in
the fierce wind blowing from the east. The troops
are leaderless and the leader is rudderless. Their
strategy, unique in American history, is making a
wish for the barbarians to be nice.
The
news from Libya gets darker, and the worst of the
bad news for the president is that if everybody at
the White House is “on message” it’s because
everyone gets to make up his (or her) own message
for nobody to believe.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who obviously
needs a good night’s sleep, got in a war of
adjectives with some of the caliphs of the Arabian
knights. She fired the first volley of adjectives at
the infamous video about the Prophet Mohammed, which
the White House, against all available evidence,
insists is the sole cause of the deadly riots. The
video is “disgusting and reprehensible,” she said,
“and it appears to have a deeply cynical purpose: to
denigrate a great religion and provoke rage.”
A
secretary of state, any secretary of state, rarely
gets to use a large-caliber word like
“reprehensible,” and Hamid Karzai, the president of
Afghanistan, fired back with large-caliber words of
his own. The video is “heinous and evil.” A
president, even of a Muslim nation whose language is
written in purple ink, rarely employs “heinous,”
which is of a slightly deeper hue than
“reprehensible.”
Mrs.
Clinton paid tribute, sort of, to the First
Amendment, which represents the principle on which
America was founded, but she couldn’t resist the
temptation to add a demeaning footnote. “There are,
of course, different views around the world about
the outer limits of free speech and free expression,
but there should be no debate about the simple
proposition that violence in response to speech is
not acceptable.”
The
footnote was not unnecessary, since the First
Amendment does not guarantee happy speech,
intelligent speech or even responsible speech. It
guarantees free speech. But others in the government
eagerly repeated the semi-apology over the first
hours after the rioting exploded. This could have
been a teaching moment about why Americans revere a
Constitution that, in the words of the Weekly
Standard, “was not written on behalf of poets and
philosophers and film producers but to enshrine the
rights of all citizens.” Instead, the White House
tried to keep the focus on the video, to distract
attention from its incompetence.
The
White House keynote of distraction was sounded first
by Jay Carney, the president’s press agent, when he
insisted the riots were not aimed at his boss, the
government, or even at “the American people,” but
only at the video. Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador
to the U.N., sounded even sillier when she insisted
the storming of the American consulate in Benghazi
was not planned and organized as a deliberate
assault on America and its diplomats, but was a
“spontaneous” happening against the movie. In her
telling, it was probably a bunch of guys in
Benghazi, loitering on the corner talking about the
what was under the chadors the girls wore, and just
happened upon a cache of automatic weapons and
rocket-propelled grenades, and when one of the good
ol’ boys suggested they attack the American
consulate from three directions, they thought, well,
why not? Guys, you know, like, will be guys.
The
Libyan government’s insistence that the riots were
not spontaneous, but highly organized and led by
outsiders from Yemen and Mali, sounds like special
pleading – blaming outsiders is always tempting for
governments under siege. But it comports with what
everyone so far knows.
If
the president wants to find someone to blame, he
should look at the face in his mirror. He imagined
that a few honeyed words would make the Islamic
world love him (and maybe even tolerate the rest of
us) merely by making goo-goo eyes at those who want
to kill us. We’ve had three years of goo-goo and the
Muslim red-hots are still killing American soldiers,
occasional civilians and selected diplomats.
Ambassador Susan Rice
Now
the government is playing movie critic. The video is
not likely to win an Oscar this or any other year,
but criticizing the religious faith of others, and
not just the faith of Christians and Jews, is well
within what Hillary Clinton calls “the outer limits
of free speech.” Apologizing, whether by word or
deed, for America is asking for trouble. Nobody does
apology for America better than Barack Obama, but
now we see what he gets for it, even if he doesn’t.
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington
Times.