You Either Abide by the First Amendment or You Don't

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You Either Abide by the First Amendment or You Don't
The Fifth Column Frank Salvato, Managing Editor

April 13, 2007

URL: http://www.newmediajournal.us/staff/fsalvato/fifth_column/04132007.htm

It really doesn’t matter whether you find radio shock jock Don Imus’s description of the women on Rutgers’ basketball team offensive or not. In an age when you can turn on any popular urban radio station and hear most of the words used in George Carlin’s “Seven Dirty Words” comedy routine the term, “nappy-headed hos” can hardly be deemed offensive, especially coming from a shock jock. What is at issue is whether or not the politically correct have used bullying tactics to infringed upon the guaranteed right of free speech under the First Amendment.

I can’t say that I am a fan of Don Imus but then I can’t say I dislike him either. I have never taken the time to listen to his radio show nor have I viewed his broadcast on MSNBC. Being from Chicago, I grew up listening to Larry Lujack, Dan Walker – the governor of Rock ‘n Roll – and later on Jonathon Brandmeir and Steve Dahl. Imus wasn’t a Chicago staple.

Of course, Chicago had its fair share of FCC imposed and special interest group inflicted radio personality suspensions but those seemed to work more in the favor of the radio show being yanked from the air than for the government or advocacy group. I predict that Imus’s suspension will work to his advantage in the long run as well. Such is the animal of America’s “car accident” curiosity and sitcom attention span.

As I see it, the larger issues surrounding the Imus matter are: whether his First Amendment right to free speech has been usurped and whether racial activism – or any activism for that matter – coupled with political correctness have grown so out of control that they contravene the sanctity of our constitutional rights.

Where contact with the public is concerned private corporations have scored great successes and made public relations blunders. Most of the time these successes and blunders have to do with their sponsorship of a television or radio broadcast, although “New Coke” stands in a class by itself. In each instance of success or failure, the free market has either heaped its approval through increased revenue generation or demonstrated its dismay with decreased sales. Either way, the free market has always – and will always – be the best way to either reward or penalize private corporations for their good deeds or bad behavior.

CBS and MSNBC, the corporations that sponsor Dom Imus’s show, and in the end Don Imus himself, will ultimately feel the effects of Mr. Imus’s on-air conduct in their wallets. When dealing with millionaires and multi-billion dollar corporations penalizing them at the cash register is always the most effective way to get their attention.

But we head down an extremely dangerous path when we start demanding that someone’s speech be censored simply because someone or some group found something they said offensive.

Just like the term “separation of church and state,” the notion that somehow there is a constitutional right “not to be offended” exists nowhere in our Founding Documents: the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But just like the afore mentioned “separation,” special interest groups and secular leftists are making in-roads through the legislative and judicial branches of government to establish additional limitations to guaranteed rights actually found in the Founding Documents.

Secular and anti-religion zealots are doing everything including applying special interest pressure on elected officials and filing a never-ending litany of lawsuits to prohibit the free exercise of religion. Gun law advocates are making advances against the Second Amendment right to bear arms city by city. The Progressive-Left and the one-world Socialists among us are incrementally chipping away at the right to freedom of speech by lobbying for hate speech legislation and, in the case of Dom Imus’s statement, encouraging race-baiting special interest charlatans to advocate for the destruction of a 40-year career.

In each instance these visionless elements seek to hijack our society despite the fact that they are challenging rights that are guaranteed under the Bill of Rights. In all cases, these anti-constitutionalists are attempting to establish a shadow rule of law based on the Marxist-Leninist Communist-Socialist principles of political correctness. Should they succeed, true liberty, true freedom will simply be something that is read about – albeit in a politically correct context – in revisionist US and world history books.

The genius of the Framers work is in its ability to promote and secure the liberties of true freedom in the face of the ignorance of the mob mentality even while it protects the right of the mob to exhibit said ignorance. In essence, and in reality, the Founding Documents guarantee an individual’s right to remain ignorant, although it was the Founders hope that Americans would choose to live a learned life. It never occurred to them that intellectually disingenuous opportunists would seek to install a “Nanny State” government for their own narcissistic purposes.

MSNBC and CBS have suspended Don Imus for two weeks and he is set to meet with the Rutgers players – the newly canonized “victims” of his offensive behavior – to issue his apology. Meanwhile a completely unimportant statement made by a shock jock that could have been rectified with the turn of a radio dial has turned into another victory for the enemy at the gates.

If I could divine one truth from this “scandal” it would be to find out what CDs are in the personal music collections of each of the members of the Rutgers women’s basketball team. Something tells me that in each, there are CDs from rap music artists that offer words and sentiments that eclipse the so-called offensive words of Don Imus. In the existence of these CDs within their collections lays the ultimate hypocrisy of political correctness.
But, as Evelyn Beatrice Hall penned under the pseudonym Stephen G. Tallentyre in paraphrasing Voltaire, “I may disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
Frank Salvato is the managing editor for The New Media Journal. He serves at the Executive Director of the Basics Project, a non-profit, non-partisan, 501(C)(3) research and education initiative. His pieces are regularly featured in over 100 publications both nationally and internationally. He has appeared on The O’Reilly Factor. He hosts The New Media Journal on BlogTalk Radio and is a regular guest on The Right Balance with Greg Allen on the Accent Radio Network, The Bruce Elliott Show on WBAL AM1090 in Baltimore and The Captain’s America on WWPR AM1490 in the Tampa Bay area, as well as an occasional guest on numerous radio shows coast to coast. His organization, Basics Project, is partnered in producing the first-ever national symposium series on the threat of radical Islamist terrorism. His pieces have been recognized by the House International Relations Committee and the Japan Center for Conflict. Mr. Salvato is available for public speaking engagements... [read more]

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The New Media Journal.us © 2007
URL: http://www.newmediajournal.us/staff/fsalvato/fifth_column/04132007.htm
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The Imus Lynch Party....by Patrick J. Buchanan

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LewRockwell.com

The Imus Lynch Party

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Are we really a better country because, after he was publicly whipped for 10 days as the worst kind of racist, with whom no decent person could associate, he was thrown off the air?

Cards on the table.

This writer works for MSNBC, has been on the Imus show scores of times, watches Imus every morning, and likes the show, the music and the guys: the I-Man, Bernie, Charles and Tom Bowman.

And Imus is among the best interviewers in our business. Not only does he read and follow the news closely, he listens and probes as well as any interviewer in America. Because he is a comic, people mistake how good a questioner he is.

Is "Imus in the Morning" outrageous? Over the top at times? Are things said every week, if not every day, where you say, "He's going too far"? Yeah. But outrageousness is part of the show, whether the skits are of "Teddy Kennedy," "Reverend Falwell," "Mayor Nagin" or "The Cardinal."

And when Imus called the Rutgers women's basketball team "tattooed ... nappy-headed ho's," he went over the top. The women deserved an apology. There was no cause, no call to use those terms. As Ann Coulter said, they were not fair game.

But Imus did apologize, again and again and again.

And lest we forget, these are athletes in their prime, the same age as young women in Iraq. They are not 5-year-old girls, and they are capable of brushing off an ignorant comment by a talk-show host who does not know them, or anything about them.

Who, after all, believed the slur was true? No one.

Compare, if you will, what was done to them – a single nasty insult – to the savage slanders for weeks on end of the Duke lacrosse team and the three players accused by a lying stripper of having gang-raped her at a frat party.

Duke faculty and talking heads took that occasion to vent their venom toward all white "jocks" on college campuses. Where are the demands for apologies from the talk-show hosts, guests, Duke faculty members and smear artists, all of whom bought into the lies about those Duke kids – because the lies comported with their hateful view of America?

And hate is what this is all about.

While the remarks of Imus and Bernie about the Rutgers women were indefensible, they were more unthinking and stupid than vicious and malicious. But malice is the right word to describe the howls for their show to be canceled and them to be driven from the airwaves – by phonies who endlessly prattle about the First Amendment.

The hypocrisy here was too thick to cut with a chainsaw.

What was the term the I-Man used? It was "ho's," slang for whores, a term employed ad infinitum et ad nauseam by rap and hip-hop "artists." It is a term out of the African-American community. Yet, if any of a hundred rap singers has lost his contract or been driven from the airwaves for using it, maybe someone can tell me about it.

If the word "ho's" is a filthy insult to decent black women, and it is, why are hip-hop artists and rap singers who use it incessantly not pariahs in the black community? Why would black politicians hobnob with them? Why are there no boycotts of the advertisers of the radio stations that play their degrading music?

Answer: The issue here is not the word Imus used. The issue is who Imus is – a white man, who used a term about black women only black folks are permitted to use with impunity and immunity.

Whatever Imus' sins, no one deserves to have Al Sharpton – hero of the Tawana Brawley hoax, resolute defender of the fake rape charge against half a dozen innocent guys, which ruined lives – sit in moral judgment upon them.

"It is our feeling that this is only the beginning. We must have a broad discussion on what is permitted and not permitted in terms of the airwaves," says Sharpton. It says something about America that someone with Al's track record can claim the role of national censor.

Who is next? And why do we take it?

I did a bad thing, but I am not a bad person, says Imus. Indeed, whoever used his microphone to do more good for more people – be they the cancer kids of Imus Ranch, the families of Iraq war dead now more justly compensated because of the I-Man or the cause of a cure for autism?

"We know of no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodic fits of morality," said Lord Macaulay. Unfortunately, Macauley never saw the likes of the Revs. Sharpton and Jackson.

Imus threw himself on the mercy of the court of elite opinion – and that court, pandering to the mob, lynched him. Yet, for all his sins, he was a better man than the lot of them rejoicing at the foot of the cottonwood tree.

April 13, 2007

Patrick J. Buchanan [send him mail] is co-founder and editor of The American Conservative. He is also the author of seven books, including Where the Right Went Wrong, and A Republic Not An Empire.

Copyright © 2007 Creators Syndicate

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http://www.lewrockwell.com/buchanan/buchanan57.html


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