If you're a liberal and the President is a Republican, your protest is penned in a mile away from where the president is. If you're a teabagger and the President is a Democrat, you can take a loaded gun to the place where the president is appearing.
If you were a lefty activist in the 1960's and you advocated armed revolution, you might find yourself on an FBI watch list for the rest of your life and ended up going to jail for conspiracy. For that matter, if you are an adviser to the president and you ever used the "r" word, you're hounded out of your post by teabaggers. But if you're a conservative teabagger in 2009, you can advocate revolution and get paid millions of dollars by a corporation to use the public airwaves to do so. You can even be a United States Congresswoman.
Imagine if, say, a group of antiwar protesters in 2004 had burned Denny Hastert in effigy. Imagine the outcry from the media. David Brooks would have shit his pants. David Broder would need an army of little girls with palm fronts to revive him from his place on the fainting couch. Chris Matthews would be sweating so profusely he'd have to wipe his own forehead right on the air. Never mind what Rush Limbaugh would have said. But if you're a teabagger, you get to burn Nancy Pelosi in effigy, and that's perfectly OK.
Because in the United States of America, anything the right does is free speech. Anything the left does is dangerous subversion. It has always been thus.
(h/t)
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire