What we need to remember — and how we should respond — to desperate attempts from this Administration and its Democrat lackeys hoping that the proposal of a “press shield law” will save them from having to speak to the AP phone scandal, is that we already have one of those: the First Amendment, right there at the top of the Bill of Rights.
And further, we need to remind these Administration officials and Democrats — and the still sleeping citizenry — that the only reason one could offer for carving out a new and specific niche of “rights” for the press, rights that will presumably voted on and passed by Congress then signed into law by a Marxist imposter playing President, is if those newly-endowed rights exclude the rights of others not in the press, who won’t be covered by said “shield.”
The upshot being that in order to be shielded from government attempts to police speech, you’ll first need to be credentialed in a way in which the government approves.
At which point, “free speech” becomes government condoned speech. And what could possibly go wrong with that?
Senator Dick Durbin admits — openly, and without seemingly any fear of backlash — that he’s not certain who and what should be protected, in this day of Twitter and blogs. People like me, for instance, who have written posts proclaiming proudly and in ALL CAPS that I AM NOT A JOURNALIST are, in Durbin’s view, perhaps not eligible for protection from governmental attempts to regulate their speech under proposed “shield” laws, because they don’t meet the standards of the “press” the government recognizes and (through credentialing) can control.
To get around this open and brazen attack on the First Amendment, Durbin hints at the very (historically unsupportable) rhetorical tack leftists have taken with the 2nd Amendment: the Founders, having lived so long ago, were fine with farmers having muskets, but they could have never foreseen the average citizen walking around with “military-style” weapons with bayonet lugs and folding stocks! Similarly here — and though our entire early “press” was a chaotic deluge of biased pamphleteers — Durbin wants to claim that the Founders couldn’t have foreseen media with so huge a reach and so rapid a form of dissemination. Therefore, who or what is protected is a matter for our betters to puzzle over — finding 21st century “solutions” to the problem of not being able to staunch the flow of information that keeps the government awash in scandal. Listen:
Durbin is despicable, but he’s consistent. And he represents the views of many on left, particularly those of the New Left, who were fine with transgressive manifestos when it was they who were outside of power hoping to overthrow “the system” (recall “Prairie Fire,” eg), but who despise the Constitution’s protections of individual rights that are explicitly presented as beyond the purview of man to control or constrain.
If, as the postmodern turn would have it, all truths are created by language, and language is a man-made construct, all truths are man-made, and any “natural rights” are thus the product of human language and human thought — and can therefore be repurposed by humans in the surface of “progress.” And if that includes heavier regulation on these wildly inappropriate freedoms granted to mere citizens — whether it be to carry a weapon or to publish opinions where they can be read — that’s what the left is prepared to do.
After all, you can’t have a tightly controlled and happily homogeneous conformity in your masses if they are allowed, on an individual level, to keep asserting their own personal agency at the expense of the collective and its Utopian ends. Can you?
We murder to dissect. For the Greater Good, you see. Not because we hold the little people in contempt and feel we need to tightly control everything they say or do in order to keep the unwashed dullards from upsetting the glorious march of history, at the end of which awaits a bureaucratically-regulated Nirvana run by a kindly governmental ruling class who is, to borrow a phrase, always looking out for the folks.
(h/t sdferr)
The President suggesting a press-shield law after what his minions have done is a little like Clinton suggesting Juanita Broaddrick put some ice on that. Allegedly.
Durbin wants to claim that the Founders couldn’t have foreseen media with so huge a reach and so rapid a form of dissemination.
Oh, so that explains the mysterious “only if it takes a good long time to disseminate” clause in the First Amendment.
I always wondered about that.
It’s a clever bit of business: government molests the people’s right, then promises to curb itself by carving off unnatural categories for protection, thus accruing ever more power to molest the people’s right. But murder is still wrong.
Andrew Ferguson at Weekly Standard writes up the Shield Law: Shielding What from Whom?
*** The Free Flow of Information Act reminds us that the free flow of information—the freedom of the press—the First Amendment itself—will thrive so long as the government doesn’t try to protect it. ***
If you want to amend an amendment, Dick, then propose that. Otherwise, respect them or else.
“Stop me before I kill again.”
Since many of the Framers of the Constitution were “pamphleteers” before the Revolution, a very dangerous “hobby” at the time, I think it’s fair to say that they did NOT mean “Credentialed, J-School Graduate Journalists” when they included “Freedom … of the Press” in the First Amendment.
If I’m not misreading it, the Supreme Court has already ruled on Senator Durbin’s bitchy complaint: Talley v. California.
If… all truths are created by language, and language is a man-made construct, all truths are man-made, and any “natural rights” are thus the product of human language and human thought — and can therefore be repurposed by humans in the surface of “progress.”
And the Grand High Priests of Reality are, of necessity, the Linguists.
You WILL bow to Chomsky and Fish.
James Taranto had some timely thoughts back on Friday:
Pablo,
I’ve seen a couple of “left-leaning” commenters at other sites claim that Durbin said “provision”, not “Amendment” and tried to argue that since “Freedom of the Press” clause is merely a “provision” within the Law (the Amendment), it could be modified and altered by Congress without having to go through the Amendment process.
The Audacity of Stupid.
Oh, goody a new thread in which hf can utter the words “meghan’s coward daddy”.
All the other threads were taken.
The 1st Amendment is about negative rights.
The Shield Law will give positive rights.
As we all know being “positive” is better.
The unseen hand is making of this distinction and the labels attached. Where you strike to cleave the world will decide which part is to be the gemstone.
It is a stroke right up there with the one where International Socialism is on the Left and National Socialism is on the Right.
the pervert Roberts court invites this kind of what the hell let’s roll the dice assault on the constitution
Yeah, except for that “Congress shall make no law…” part.
That and/or Newspeak.
The Audacity of Stupid.
They’re not stupid; they’re determined to be in charge of everyone and everything by any means necessary.
NEVER give them the rhetorical benefit of the doubt by attributing to stupidity what can accurately be explained by raw power-lust.
Hobbes, Leviathan, Ch. XI, Of the Difference of Manners
*** BY MANNERS, I mean not here decency of behaviour; as how one man should salute another, or how a man should wash his mouth, or pick his teeth before company, and such other points of the small morals; but those qualities of mankind that concern their living together in peace and unity. To which end we are to consider that the felicity of this life consisteth not in the repose of a mind satisfied. For there is no such finis ultimus (utmost aim) nor summum bonum (greatest good) as is spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers. Nor can a man any more live whose desires are at an end than he whose senses and imaginations are at a stand. Felicity is a continual progress of the desire from one object to another, the attaining of the former being still but the way to the latter. The cause whereof is that the object of man’s desire is not to enjoy once only, and for one instant of time, but to assure forever the way of his future desire. And therefore the voluntary actions and inclinations of all men tend not only to the procuring, but also to the assuring of a contented life, and differ only in the way, which ariseth partly from the diversity of passions in diverse men, and partly from the difference of the knowledge or opinion each one has of the causes which produce the effect desired.
So that in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death. And the cause of this is not always that a man hopes for a more intensive delight than he has already attained to, or that he cannot be content with a moderate power, but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more. And from hence it is that kings, whose power is greatest, turn their endeavours to the assuring it at home by laws, or abroad by wars: and when that is done, there succeedeth a new desire; in some, of fame from new conquest; in others, of ease and sensual pleasure; in others, of admiration, or being flattered for excellence in some art or other ability of the mind. ***
Whence, Madison, Fed. 51, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”
dicentra says May 28, 2013 at 10:53 am
They’re not stupid
I beg to differ. Stupidity doesn’t rule out malice. Drag a prog away from his office in a university, or his teleprompter, or his manifesto talking points, and most of them are not just pedestrian, but Zimmer-frame-pedestrian in their thoughts and understanding of human nature.
Stupidity isn’t incompatible with a low sort of cunning. And really, is that stupidity, or ignorance?
I suppose the stupidity is in the notion that they have nothing to learn, the theory having been worked out in advance.
Zimmer-frame-pedestrian in their thoughts and understanding of human nature.
And yet, they manage to have wagged the dog quite thoroughly, despite their “stupidity.”
They’re not cognitively incapable of understanding human nature: they’ve just decided that they like their “infinite malleability” theorem better, and their insistence on sticking to it is motivated not by lack of cerebral capacity but by their overwhelming desire to be in charge.
Willful blindness is not the same as actual blindness: you can cure the latter by pointing things out to the inattentive; the former is rooted so deeply in the soul that not even the devil himself can dig it out.
I suppose the stupidity is in the notion that they have nothing to learn
Also known as arrogance.
Which is another word for moral or spiritual stupidity, but it says nothing of one’s cognitive capabilities.
By which I mean that there are people who dropped out of school in 8th grade who get the concept that people cannot be trusted with power, so you ought to spread it out, if you grant it at all.
Or that one way to prevent a gubmint from being tyrannical is to make sure people can speak the truth about it.
Or that an armed populace discourages a gubmint from getting too uppity.
Or that people should be able to decide how they’re governed.
Our Friends In Academia are also capable of understanding those concepts; they just HATE them because of their dark, tyrannical souls.
But notice Hobbes speaks of “all mankind”, making no distinction between the stupid and the clever, the wise and the unwise, the moron or the brilliant thinker, the average twit and the average mind-his-own-businesser. So regarding the crux of politics from his point of view, it makes no matter whether one is faced with a power-seeking genius or a power-seeking moron, or for that matter, a leftist or a conservative, the central problem remains the same, as Madison seems to have managed to winkle out.
When I first read Durbin’s remarks over the weekend I noticed that he is getting the 1 amendment and the purpose of shield laws confused.
The first protects the content of the publication. The shield laws in the several states protect reporters from revealing their sources. These are different. The first clearly covers everyone idiot. Shield law are for “journalists” which I assume is what he meant and not sure why he felt the need to say something so dumb regarding the constitution.
However, I should see that it comes back to the 1st because in the absence of shield laws, it becomes a backdoor way of of punishing the publisher/speaker.
The usual mendacious idiocy from The OTHER Senator from the Outfit.
dicentra says May 28, 2013 at 11:24 am
And yet, they manage to have wagged the dog quite thoroughly, despite their “stupidity.”
I get your point, but does any of what’s happened to this country require genius be behind it? Collectivism is hard to beat, because by its very nature it is organized to its own advantage over the long term. The “Reagan Revolution” died with Reagan (actually when he left office with no heir to his legacy). No single leftist standard bearer matters to that extent.
The dichotomy of individualism vs collectivism is largely a battle of marketing and message appeal. They have the press and Hollywood; the best we can hope for is a single spokesman who can articulate individualism at a level that so captivates and motivates people that they look past the warped context the media will try to frame him/her with.
The main reason I can’t see brilliance in the present state of affairs is that I don’t believe it can continue. Europe is becoming destabilized, and America isn’t far behind. Whatever happens, I don’t think the ruling class utopians* will be able to hold power when the collapse occurs.
*That isn’t to say that I think we win, either.
[…] From Jeff Goldstein, we learn: […]
the best we can hope for is a single spokesman who can articulate individualism
Because there just plain aren’t any articulate individuals on the right.
Not one.
Cripes.
As long as certain people and ideas can be smeared as “uncool” or “beyond the pale” by the trend-setters, no amount of articulateness can save us. Lies prevail when people stop insisting that the truth be told.
The proggs are giving away free ice cream, and all we have to offer is self-control, personal responsibility, and Cold Hard Truth.
They’re offering the path of least resistance; the natural entropy in human society means that’s the track most people will follow, especially if it’s portrayed as socially normal, sophisticated, or hip.
I don’t believe it can continue
Of course it can’t; they’re pursuing the entropic state. Judeo-Christianity, the Enlightenment, and our Founding Docs imposed order on chaos, and these wicked beings are unraveling it because they lack the spiritual/moral fortitude to hew to the difficult standard of TRVTH.
The trouble with clever people is that they think they can defy the iron laws of nature; it explains why Wall Street so frequently self-destructs: arrogant jackholes figured they could game the system with their incandescent cleverness — proggs are doing the same with human society. They’re so clever that they can ignore history and create the world anew.
A high degree of intelligence in the scholastic arena is what LEADS to this kinds of arrogance. Sometimes stupid people learn the pose so they can sit at the table with the kewl kids, but the clever ones are the primary generators of this B.S.
dicentra says May 28, 2013 at 1:12 pm
Because there just plain aren’t any articulate individuals on the right.
Not any who are running for office, and really not any who can defy the media by making generally apolitical people buy-in the way Reagan did, and no amount of smear/attack seriously impacted that connection.
OT (But still 1st amendment related)
Silly Christians and their persecution complex.
What is this Journalism degree you speak of? No such thing existed when the US Constitution was ratified. How exactly could the First Amendment possibly be referring to such credentialed journalists?
It isn’t so much that Progressives believe they have nothing to learn than they believe you cannot possibly have anything to teach them. Because of the racism, homophobia, etc.
“The proggs are giving away free ice cream”
No. No they’re not. Someone pays. Someone always pays.
“a single spokesman who can articulate individualism”
Squire Froman will be by later with a polysylibic disertation on that very subject.
Reagan spent 20 years running for president, paying lots of dues and building a coalition. I remember someone I worked with talking about how Reagan came to speak at his grade school in the 60s.
Today’s establishment will not support or allow that. It’s the next in line now ever since Bob Dole.
“It isn’t so much that Progressives believe they have nothing to learn than they believe you cannot possibly have anything to teach them.”
The world is full of answers awaiting the right question.
“a single spokesman who can articulate individualism”
I do so hope he/she has an exquisite pant crease.
No. No they’re not. Someone pays. Someone always pays.
Yes, the fat rich bastards on Wall Street who aren’t paying their fair share.
Ergo, it’s free ice cream for the rest of us.
TNSTAAFL
Mi scusi. It wasn’t my intent to raise mi voce. Gauche? Tell me about it.
a stands for ain’t when it ain’t standing for as a.
If he were my Senator I would write him an Angry Letter displaying my Concern.
I would begin with the customary niceites.
Dear Dick:
May I call you a Dick? bla bla bla. Sincerely, Bite Me.
P.S. Sincerely I mean that truely and sincerely. And once again, Bite Me.
See; that wasn’t hard at all. And I have the added benefit of actully feeling like I have thought about accomplishing something Noteworthy. Sooo I got that going for me.
Some arguments really can only be won by example. Living the citizenly life gives as much shelter against Heinlein’s “bad luck” as can be had.
Senator Durbin needs a very hot lead slug to meet his oblong head. Fuck you secret service. I won’t do it, unless that asshole looks at me sideways :)
goof them peeps not shoot them
[…] BEWARE THE DURBIN, blog-hater– “free speech” becomes government condoned speech. And what could possibly go […]
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