Posted by
Always To The Right on Wednesday, October 01, 2008 5:44:49 PM
Andy McCarthy slams Barack Obama
and his campaign for its free-speech thuggery of the past few weeks in
his latest NRO column. Forget Islamist encroachment via shari’a, McCarthy advises. Now we have the tyranny of The One before us, and it may yet prevail
Critics of the BCRA (McCain-Feingold) had the same concern over its
application, especially when the FEC considered applying its provisions
to the blogosphere. People scoff at warnings such as this from
McCarthy and say, “Charges would never stand up in court,” but the prosecutors wouldn’t have to prevail in court in order to win.
If political criticism ran the risk of an expensive criminal defense,
how many of us would indulge ourselves in our First Amendment right to
speak truth to power?
Some may be tempted to shrug this off as an ironic payback to McCain
for the BCRA, but McCarthy rejects that. In both cases, the true
victim isn’t an opposing politician but the Americans who assumed that
the First Amendment guaranteed the right to political speech more than
the right to dance nude in front of drunk frat boys. Allowing this
kind of legal intimidation to political speech guarantees that we will
have less of it. It also shows a certain tendency towards fascism
among Team Obama’s supporters that voters should carefully consider.