Supreme Court’s Dismissal Curtails Free Speech and Nobody Cares

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
new york city, New York, United States of America (Free-Press-Release.com) October 18, 2010 -- In a little discussed issue, on Tuesday the Supreme Court dismissed a case in which the plaintiffs claimed that their free speech rights had been violated by the Bush Administration. During a 2005 public gathering featuring a presidential speech about Social Security in Denver, Leslie Weise and Alex Young arrived in a car brandishing a “No More Blood for Oil” bumper sticker and, even though they say they did not protest or disrupt the event, they were ejected.

That this could occur in America is shocking in itself. But the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the case is beyond comprehension. How could the government get away with this? The plaintiffs didn’t even do anything controversial. It’s not as though they heckled the President. And it certainly is not comparable to the venomous nonsense that the far left has hurled at Bush (calling him a Nazi) or the equally offensive insanity coming from the right about Obama. I see no real debate in this case, and neither does the highest court in the land, apparently. Only they think the government’s conduct was obviously appropriate while I beg to differ with equal conviction.

Of course, you likely won’t hear about the court’s dismissal from conservative media outlets (a search for Leslie Weiss on the FOX News Web site yields a blog entry, not even a story), in spite of their feigned commitment to preserving the First Amendment and apocryphal and hypocritical claim that Obama wants to employ the Fairness Doctrine to curtail free speech by “silencing” those on the right who disagree with him ( http://www.factcheck.org/2009/03/the-fairness-doctrine/ ).

But why aren’t most Americans up in arms about such a blatant violation of the Constitution? Sadly, this development mirrors the wide-scale ignorance about Bush’s unprecedented usurpation of power in his war on terror. Most Americans don’t know, for example, that the two top lawyers in the Bush Administration, Jon Yoo and David Addington, abused the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) at the U.S. Department of Justice to create a legal apparatus that made it essentially impossible to incarcerate officials who commit certain crimes. As Jane Mayer reports in her indispensable book about the war on terror called The Dark Side, “if the OLC says a previously outlawed practice, such as waterboarding, is legal, it is nearly impossible to prosecute U.S. officials who followed that advice on good faith” (65).

Why does almost nobody know about any of this? The answer remains a matter of debate, but I surmise that it’s a fall-out from the left’s knee-jerk demonizing of Bush from the moment he entered office. His enemies were so eager to paint him as a Nazi and a tyrant that their strategy backfired because by the time it was revealed that he had abused his powers in ways that make Nixon look like George Washington, independents and moderate democrats who hadn’t been frantically searching for excuses to undermine Bush no longer took much of the grandiose criticism seriously (I can say that I certainly fell into this category before conducting research). Consequently, the fact that Bush is undeniably a war criminal, even by his own administration’s implicit admission, (Dick Cheney spent much of Obama’s first year speaking out in favor of torture), seems to smack of nothing more than a liberal smear campaign to most Americans. It will be interesting to see if the same thing happens to the right in their tireless drive to cast Obama as a foreign-born dictator. Should he ever remove opponents of the War in Afghanistan from public gatherings to punish them for exercising free speech or initiate policies that make a mockery of the justice system (and, no, forcing Americans to get health care is certainly not one of them), perhaps nobody will take his critics’ accusations seriously either.

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