Originally Published By San Diego News Room, April, 2010
One of the perks to being a former president is that you still get to travel around the country giving speeches. Embracing this rich tradition is Bill Clinton, who spoke on the anniversary of the horrible, tragic Oklahoma City bombing at the Center for American Progress. I don’t know what he was paid for this smooth, tongue twisting verbage, but I do know the price for the rest of us should judges or legislators take his words seriously: The First Amendment’s protection of free speech would no longer be worth the paper it is printed on.
According to Clinton, “What we learned from Oklahoma City is not that we should gag each other or that we should reduce our passion for the positions we hold – but that the words we use really do matter, because there’s this vast echo chamber, and they go across space and they fall on the serious and the delirious alike. They fall on the connected and the unhinged alike.”
This is double talk if I ever heard it. On one hand, he is not calling us to “reduce our passion for the positions we hold.” On the other hand, “the words we use really do matter.” Translation: Emotionally charged speech from the right is responsible if a new Timothy McVeigh goes out and bombs another federal building. What else could he possibly mean if this is something we “learned from Oklahoma City.”?
In any event, it was not the first time Clinton ascribed McVeigh blame to Conservatives. Back in 1995 he specifically pointed his finger at Talk Radio.
According to Howard Kurtz, who wrote for The Washington Post at the time, President Clinton was denouncing “loud and angry voices” and pointing to our airwaves as a means “to keep some people as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all torn up and upset with each other.” Clinton also said, “They spread hate, they leave the impression that, by their very words, that violence is acceptable. . . .”
Our former president may have more prestige than other liberal critics of conservative discourse but he is certainly not alone in his opinion. Nancy Pelosi recently called upon people to tone down the rhetoric out of a similar fear, the possible instigation of violence. And just recently on NBC’s The Chris Matthews Show, Time Magazine commentator, Joe Klein literally accused people like Glen Beck and Sarah Palin as being “seditious.”
But during the eight years of the Bush administration, we were told that political dissent was patriotic. How many times was President Bush compared to Hitler? How often was his administration described as a “regime” not unlike Sadam Hussein’s? I don’t seem to recall any prominent liberals asking their peers to tone down the inflammatory talk.
Truth be told, political dissent is one of the things our framers had in mind when they added the First Amendment to our constitution. Speech is often offensive. That’s why it needs protecting. If all speech sounded benign, why would we have even needed a First Amendment?
President Clinton, the only ones responsible for the Oklahoma City massacre are Timothy McVeigh and any of his accomplices. I will not blame Talk Radio or Fox News, anymore than I would blame your thoughtless, irresponsible, explotive speech if violence were ever perpetrated upon a conservative commentator. This is still America after all, at least for moment.
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