Congressman Cotton was excellent on drones and Benghazi on "Fox News Sunday."

(Transcript. Video.) I had never heard of the guy, but he impressed the hell out of me, in part because the host Chris Wallace, introduced Cotton — a Republican from Arkansas — this way:

Congressman Cotton, for people who don't know you, you are kind of an interesting figure. You went to Harvard, you went to Harvard Law School, and then you spent five years on active duty, on the front lines, in Iraq and Afghanistan, so you have got a lot of credibility on this issue on both sides of the equation.

I'm not a complete pushover for credentials, but this made me want to pay attention when Wallace invited him to respond to Senator Dianne Feinstein's idea that we need, as Wallace put it, "a secret drone court, where the president would have to go to get approval before putting terror suspects on his kill list.... How do you feel about this idea? Before the president could target someone for assassination, especially an American citizen, he'd have to go get approval from a judge?"

COTTON: We don't need federal judges involved in sensitive and urgent national security matters, and it would be an unconstitutional infringement on the president's rights to keep America safe. So, if you take up arms against America and you fight in a terrorist training camp or on the front lines in Pakistan or Afghanistan or Yemen, you shouldn't be surprised if America reaches out and exacts justice against you.

A while later, there was a discussion of Leon Panetta's testimony about Benghazi. Co-panelist Bill Kristol went first and laid out the criticism of Obama pithily:

KRISTOL: I think it is genuinely shocking. The president -- Leon Panetta walked out of the Oval Office at 5:30 that night, after a previously scheduled meeting. The president never called -- he knew -- he briefed the president on what was happening in Benghazi and that the American ambassador was missing, and it was clear there could well be sustained and ongoing attacks, and the president never spoke to the secretary of defense or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff the rest of that night, and, interestingly, Secretary Panetta said he never spoke to the White House later this night. So it's not as if he spoke to the national security adviser, Tom Donilon, or the chief of staff, Jack Lew, and said, and conveyed a message to or from the president.

So basically, the president seems to have checked out. He spent an hour that evening on the phone with the Israeli prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu, because there has been that flap about Israel at the Democratic Convention the week before, and I think he wanted for political reasons to show that he was in touch with the Israelis. They did a readout of that call, the National Security Council spokesman did. So they're busy talking to the Israeli prime minister, doing the readout of the call for the press, and he is not talking to Panetta and, insofar as we -- and Donilon, apparently, is not talking to Panetta. And it is really, I think, a dereliction of duty on the part of the president and his senior staff, and I think they should be asked about it. I think Tom Donilon, the national security adviser, and Jack Lew, the White House chief of staff, should -- the president did not talk to anyone. Did they even talk to the secretary of defense, or did they just say, do what you can and then totally checked out for that evening, and then the next morning the president goes off to Las Vegas for a fund-raiser?

Cotton followed on, bringing in his military expertise:

COTTON: It is not just shocking, I would say it is outrageous as well, and it shows he has lack of preparation to be the commander in chief and lead troops when they are in combat. You know, you mentioned I was in the Army. At Fort Benning, where I spent a year, you learn the eight-step troop leading procedures. Step eight, the final step, is not issue an order. Step seven is issue the order. Step eight, which is the most important step, is supervise. He said in September that I issued a directive to take whatever steps are necessary to protect our troops and our assets. And then as Bill said, he never again followed up, he never asked, is my directive being executed? That is the essence of leadership, and this is a complete failure of leadership.

WALLACE: What about the argument, Congressman, and I don't know, and Bill raises a legitimate question, maybe he was doing this through his national security adviser.

COTTON: What General Dempsey and Secretary Panetta said, indicates there was no further contact from the White House, and the president showed no curiosity at all. He had a conversation with Prime Minister Netanyahu that was in the middle of [the] political season when he was receiving criticism for not being engaged with the prime minister, and then probably preparing to fly off to Las Vegas the next day for a fundraiser.

When you have troops in contact -- when I was in Afghanistan, we had troops in contact. I was right next to the radio, monitoring that at all times. When the president has troops in contact in an embassy that he knows is insecure, that has to be the very first priority.

Cotton also got my attention earlier in the show when Wallace asked whether the decision to have Marco Rubio deliver the GOP response to the SOTU makes him "the new face of the Republican Party on Capitol Hill."

COTTON: I wouldn't say that decision makes him. I think he has been an emerging leader on Capitol Hill for Republicans, and across the country for two years now. He's a generation of new leaders, not just Marco, but Paul Ryan and Scott Walker and so forth, who are emerging and who I think are going to be the leaders of our party going forward.

So, wanting to portray Rubio as not The One but part of "a generation of new leaders" and needing to name some names, Cotton comes up with Paul Ryan — the erstwhile VP nominee — and — of all the others — Scott Walker. I read that out loud and Meade deemed it time to play the Governor Walker anthem one more time:

"Republicans and Fox News are moving to purge the controversial political creatures they created."

"Both were damaged badly in 2012 by loud, partisan voices that stoked the base — but that scared the hell out of many voters. Now, the GOP, with its dismal image, and Fox News, with its depressed ratings in January, are scrambling to dim those voices."

That's the way Politico puts it.

"Five Bloggers I’d Like To See On FOX News."

American Glob.

"Everything I do turns into a disaster. I guess I really don't know what Christmas is all about."

It's all about... terror!

"Is this just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better or is this real?"

Megyn Kelly asked Karl Rove — as hilariously/painfully magnified by Jon Stewart:

[VIEW CLIP HERE.]

As the tags below indicate, there's some other material in that clip too. If you're one of those who find this painful rather than hilarious, I would recommend that you seriously contemplate the meaning underlying the humor. It's important.

When Chris Wallace raises the topic of Libya, David Axelrod laughs.

On Fox News Sunday just now:



ADDED: Here's the transcript.

"We really messed up, and we are all really sorry. That didn’t belong on TV."

Shep Smith, after Fox News shows a man shoot himself in the head.

"Sometimes we see a lot of things that we don’t let get to you – because it’s not time appropriate, it’s insensitive, and it’s just wrong. And that was wrong."

Debate moderators announced... and include Candy Crowley, who reacted to the Paul Ryan VP announcement with the phrase "some sort of ticket death wish."

Drudge aptly assembles the links:

DEBATE MODERATORS ANNOUNCED:
PBS Jim Lehrer, first Pres debate, Oct 3 Denver...
CNN Candy Crowley, town hall, Oct 16, Hempstead NY...
CBS Bob Schieffer, third Pres debate, Oct. 22, Boca Raton...
ABC Martha Raddatz, VP debate, Oct 11, Danville KY...
FLASHBACK: CROWLEY: Some Think Ryan Pick 'Some Sort of Ticket Death Wish'...
60 MINS edits out Ryan talking about Medicare mom in Florida...

That last link might seem less apt, a bit off topic. But think about it. It's not. Drudge knows what he's doing. This is about media bias.

So all the moderators will be liberals. Can't help that — you say? — all the big media people are liberal. Couldn't we get one Fox News person — Chris Wallace, for example? But Fox News is somehow known to be biased in a way that those other networks are not. Ironically, the reason that factoid is known is that we learned it through all those other media outlets. Their voices corroborate the view that Fox News is biased. Perception of bias is a numbers games.

ADDED: Why Crowley? They needed a woman... and it was the best they could do?

9 minutes in June — reporting the Obamacare case.

Tom Goldstein — of SCOTUSblog, which got it right — examines the details of how CNN and FoxNews got it wrong.

10:08:30.... On the blog, readers are starting to taunt us via our comments feature (there ultimately will be 13,500 comments over the course of the Live Blog):  Guest, “CNN was first, guys…”; Bill, “Fox is already announcing decision”; yolanda, “TV just announced the decision beat you to it”; Guest, “Fox News beats soctusblog….”



It takes me almost one minute exactly to analyze the decision.... I unmute the conference call line and repeat what we have just posted....

Opponents of the Act, having seen the television reports, are incredulous and vocal in their responses:  Guest, “WHAT???”; Guest, “no reports says its gone!”; Republican, “OMFG”; Tim, “No it isn’t”; Ryan, “Bullshit”; Guest, “apparently you have it wrong”; Sarika, “IT IS NOT SURVIVING AS A TAX!!”; Fred, “It sounds like you guys are spinning this thing.  Knock it off and read the law!”

Others have seen enough to know that they need another news source:  Guest, “I’m outta here.  Turning on TV”; David, “I won’t be back to this site.”

And some indicate we are simply too late, and that Fox and CNN’s earlier reports are res judicata on other journalists:  John, “They already struck it down”; Guest, “The mandate is GONE.”

Ha ha. Much more at the link.

HBO drops Roger Ailes TV movie because it "could never be seen as objective."

That's their asserted reason. They cite their "CNN affiliation," which would supposedly interfere with their presentation of a movie that was being executive produced by MSNBC.

The HBO movie would have been based on the upcoming manuscript by media writer Gabriel Sherman who has written two cover stories for New York magazine on Ailes and Fox News, including his mammoth article “The Elephant In The Green Room” which prompted complaints from the Fox News CEO.

How can the reason be true? It it were true, they wouldn't have started the project in the first place.

The news of dropping the project comes after Nikki Finke revealed that it existed, saying:

HBO appears obsessed by GOP Conservatives. There have been movies about the 2000 Bush vs Gore election standoff and Sarah Palin and most recently a TV series featuring George W Bush’s severed head. Now HBO has done a secret deal for an Untitled Roger Ailes Project....

"Fox went with GloatFest 2012... MSNBC went with MSN be sad."

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Roger Ailes answers critics who say the women he puts on Fox News are mostly blonde.

"When women get into television, they dye their hair blonde."

Something about TV and blondness, apparently. But what?

When I was a teenager in the 1960s, and there were no women newsreaders on TV or radio, a high school teacher explained to the class that women could not be hired for these positions because their high-pitched voices simply did not work properly in broadcasting. A male voice was — to use a contemporary employment law term — a bona fide occupational qualification. He said it with utmost seriousness and authority, like it was science, and though it made me feel angry and rebellious, I believed him. Something about the technical equipment, which is another thing only the males can handle.

"Fox News Viewers Know Less Than People Who Don't Watch Any News: Study."

There's a headline from HuffPo, which surely doesn't contribute to the deterioration of one's knowledge... does it?

By the way, here's Skeptoid's "Top 10 Worst Anti-Science Websites." HuffPo makes the list:

HuffPo aggressively promotes worthless alternative medicine such as homeopathy, detoxification, and the thoroughly debunked vaccine-autism link. In 2009, Salon.com published a lengthy critique of HuffPo's unscientific (and often exactly wrong) health advice, subtitled Why bogus treatments and crackpot medical theories dominate "The Internet Newspaper". HuffPo's tradition is neither new nor just a once-in-a-while thing.

Science journalists have repeatedly taken HuffPo to task for this, and repeatedly been rebuffed or not allowed to submit fact-based rebuttals. HuffPo's anti-science stance on health and medicine appears to be deliberately systematic and is unquestionably pervasive.

People who read HuffPo's medical coverage know more than people who read other news sites. The problem is that so much of that extra stuff they know is a total crap. And, unlike confusion about whether protesters in Syria and Egypt have taken down their governments, believing that crap can lead to death.

I'm so sad they let Gary Johnson into the GOP debate but not Thaddeus McCotter.

And now McCotter is withdrawing, saying, "It was sort of death by media."

James Taranto comments:

[Gary] Johnson, who served as governor of New Mexico from 1995 through 2003, is ideologically similar to Rep. Ron Paul, which is to say that he is a hard-core economic conservative whose foreign-policy views tend toward isolationism....

His speaking style is as bland as his ideological views are astringent....

That doesn't mean Fox is wrong to include him in its debate. True, his chance of being the Republican nominee is so low as to be indistinguishable from zero. But that's true of a majority of the other candidates who'll be on stage with him. His ideas deserve a hearing, and a presentation from someone who doesn't seem wild-eyed.

But if Gary Johnson is allowed in the debate, for goodness' sake, why wasn't Thaddeus McCotter? The representative from Michigan's 11th District is the most entertaining political speaker we've ever seen, with the possible exception of Sarah Palin. We don't agree with him on everything--he's one of the few Republicans to support forcible unionization by "card check"--but again, his ideas deserved a hearing. And he has the added advantage of being great fun to watch....

But it's not about fun, and it really isn't fair to the frontrunners for the characters to be playing a different, distracting game.

And hang out with me here when the debate starts this evening at 9 ET/8 CT. We're back to Fox News, so... presumably, more attention to what's wrong with Obama and fewer of those wedge issues that seem designed to stoke anti-GOP loathing.

LIVE now on FoxNews: The latest on the debt ceiling crisis.

Note the time stamp: 9:44 CT.

To be fair to Fox News, they did carry the President's latest speech before they went to the potted plant. And to be fair to the potted plant, it was perfectly articulate. It said everything I needed to hear. 

Hacking the Fox News Twitter feed, tweeting a false report of presidential assassination.

"We wish @joebiden the best of luck as our new President of the United States. In such a time of madness, there’s light at the end of tunnel."

Media Matters makes a montage of the Glenn Beck show.

Media Matters hates Glenn Beck, but this montage is pretty damned entertaining, perhaps because the Fox News channel show is ending. Tonight is the last installment:

An advertising boycott that began after Beck said Obama had a “deep-seated hatred for white people” led to more than 400 advertisers telling Fox they didn’t want their commercials seen on his show.

Fox and Beck headed for a divorce, their relationship largely soured by control issues. Beck has set up his own diversified business, as he makes speeches, writes books and owns a website along with GBTV, which is run by a former Fox executive.

That Media Matters montage made me...
	... think about why I love Glenn Beck.
	... wish I'd paid more attention to what might have been a great show.
	... think about why I hate Glenn Beck.
	... realize that man needed to be exiled to the internet.
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"What happened after the Obama election, I think, is that Fox morphed into something that isn’t even recognizable as a form of media."

"It looks more like a political committee than what it looked like pre-Obama, which was essentially talk radio on television. It’s more dangerous now; it’s more lethal. And so as Fox has doubled down, we’ve doubled down."

We  = David Brock and his Foxophobic enterprise Media Matters for America.

Brock has used his buck-raking ability to turn Media Matters into a political force. What began in 2004 as a ten-person shop with a $3 million annual budget now has around 90 employees and plans to spend $15 million this year. In a fancy office building on Massachusetts Avenue, the organization’s researchers work in six-hour monitoring shifts, from five in the morning till one at night, watching Fox or listening to talk radio in the hope that Rush or Sean or some other conservative yakker will step in it. They’re seldom disappointed. “I knew that as soon as you started shining a light on these people,” Brock says, “there was enough outrageous and despicable and offensive and false commentary that you could make a splash.”

I appreciate their work! Keep clipping those clips and serving them up. As you monitor FoxNews and Limbaugh, I'll monitor you and whatever the hell you've morphed into. To me, it's all recognizable as media. And I'm always looking for juicy bits to chew on.

Part of Media Matters’ strength is its staff’s almost unfathomable endurance. “People who work here have to have a personality that enjoys getting angry watching Fox for six hours every day but then being patient enough to want to fact-check every second of it,” explains Ari Rabin-Havt, Media Matters’ executive vice-president. 

Ha. I love the way New York Magazine, writing this lengthy piece, goes to the Media Matters executives. I'd like to hear from those employees who do the detail work, "getting angry" for the rich execs. They're supposed to be all about truth and anger and for the left...  always for the left. How does that feel, as you comb through all those video files, looking for trouble truth — but only one perspective of the truth — and cull the clips that make the truth that your bosses want to tell as truthy as possible? Are you angry enough all the time, angry in the right way, angry about truth as you do the bidding of guys who are raking in money to get at the people you're paid to hate for them? What are you paid?

The group demands accuracy from those staffers. Last year, according to Rabin-Havt, Media Matters produced 20,000 pieces of content and issued only 24 corrections. “There’s the expectation that you can’t get something wrong,” he says. “There are consequences for mistakes. One person was fired for an error last year.”

Oh! How ineffably virtuous of you! Get to work, staffers! Stay angry, stay truthy, cut clips that stoke hatred of the right, but don't cut them to the point where we have to issue a correction, or we will cut you.

(Hey, that guy who got cut should write an exposé of what goes on inside Media Matters.)

Glenn Beck will "transition off" Fox News.

Announced just now.

The Bob Wright/Ann Althouse email exchange about what free speech means in the context of saying Roger Ailes needs to kick Glenn Beck off Fox News.

Back on February 2, I wrote “When did the left turn against free speech?” and used some clips from a Bloggingheads I did with Bob Wright, in which I talked about free speech values and rejected Bob's attempt to restrict the idea of free speech to the constitutional right to free speech, which only deals with the problem of government restrictions on speech.

The text of my post, however, doesn't restate our disagreement about the meaning of the term, and Bob emailed me to complain. And then last Friday, I did another Bloggingheads, and Bob brought up his beef about the definition of the term again. So I invited him to give me permission to publish the whole email exchange, and he agreed, so here goes...

In the blog post, explaining Bob Wright's position, I said that he thought that "free speech is too dangerous because it might be false and it might inspire bad people to act out in terrible ways." Since Bob's point was that Roger Ailes should kick Glenn Beck off the air, Bob said:

Don’t you think most people take ‘free speech’ to refer to speech that is unconstrained by the government? In which case [that] passage from your blog post is a somewhat misleading characterization of my views?...

I said not once but twice in our exchange that I absolutely wasn’t suggesting any government constraint on speech.

I responded:

I said in the diavlog itself [in a clip embedded in the blog post] that I don't agree with that limitation. Free speech is a value that extends beyond the right that people have against government, just as privacy and autonomy are larger ideas than their corresponding legal rights. Moreover, it is when people lose the value in its larger form that they slip into accepting government limitations. There's an interrelationship between cultural values and the law, and an evolution of values against free speech can play out in legal restrictions later on.

Bob said:

Just about everyone loses the value in its larger form, including, I venture to say, you. Surely there is *some* essay or article that you would say a conscientious newspaper editor shouldn’t publish, right? Say, for example, an op-ed piece recommending that all black people be killed? And, again, the question isn’t whether the editor should be *allowed* to publish it; we’re talking about moral sanction, not legal sanction. I’m saying that pretty much everyone, when you examine their beliefs closely, *does* believe that moral sanction has *some* place in shaping our discourse. But maybe you’ll surprise me and say that an editor who publishes a piece recommending the killing of all blacks shouldn’t be be condemned, and wouldn’t be condemned by you. Is that your position?

I said:

What's missing from that hypothetical is that the newspaper has free speech rights too. It doesn't have to pass along other people's speech unless it wants to, just as I don't have to quote people on my blog unless I decide too.

It doesn't have to publish anything it doesn't want, for whatever reason. This is what it means to acknowledge that corporations deserve free speech too.

The moral sanction is just more free speech as I see it.

The simpler way of putting that is that people continue to argue about what is true, what is good and what to do and believe. That's free speech. My preference is to argue on the substantive merits rather than to gasp about how bad people need to be cut off from the people who are choosing to listen to them.

Again, I support the free speech of the publisher. No one has to reproduce any speech they don't want to... for any reason, so there is no need to say exactly where the line is for any given organization to decide what they want to say or offer up as an op-ed.

Bob said:

Exactly. And when you choose not to quote people on your blog are you denying them free speech?

No, right?

So when I advocate that you not quote someone I’m not advocating that you deny anyone free speech.

That’s the exact analogy: If Roger Ailes chooses not to give Glenn Beck a show, he’s not denying him free speech. So if I advocate that Roger Ailes not give him a show, I’m not advocating that anyone be denied free speech.

I said:

I agree that you are exercising free speech when you aim moral suasion at Ailes. You're doing the public shaming thing, which I understand. But Fox News wants Beck on the air, because a lot of people like to listen to him. You can avoid him yourself, but you want to stop the people who want to hear him from getting to hear him by convincing Fox that speech like that is not acceptable. So you're using speech to make an argument about what speech is acceptable and trying to persuade Fox to agree with you about the narrow range of acceptable speech, trumping the preferences of the people who do want to be able to see Beck on TV. If your method worked, there would be a narrower range of speech available to people who are currently eager to hear that sort of thing. You don't trust them enough to try to persuade them with arguments running in the other direction from Beck's. You want them to be protected from speech you think is bad. I see that as an anti-free speech position, because you aren't about talking more to the people you want to influence, you're about protecting them from the dangers in the speech you think is bad.

Bob said:

OK, so now I’m pretty convinced of the truth of something I suggested earlier in this exchange: If Roger Ailes ran a show whose host was devoted to encouraging people to kill every black person they see, you (a) would not condemn Roger Ailes and (b) would consider me anti-free speech if I did condemn Roger Ailes.

That’s in some sense a defensible position. But I’m sure you’ll agree it’s a minority position—most Americans don’t consider it “anti-free-speech” to condemn Ailes for at least *some* programming decisions, and to try to shame him into changing them. That’s why I said your depiction of my views as anti-free-spech is misleading. Most people don’t define “anti-free speech” the way you’re defining it.

Please do me one favor: Let me know whether my first paragraph, above, does or does not mischaracterize your position. If it doesn’t, then I think I totally understand your position and there’s probably not a lot to be gained by further elaboration. If it does mischaracterize your position, then I’m afraid I remain confused. (Wouldn’t be the first time!)

I said:

I think your hypothetical has the same problem that made Godwin invent his rule about bringing up Hitler. It's not conceivable that Fox would have a show like that, and if we lived in a world where there were shows like that on widely seen networks, everything would be different. How did it happen that blatantly racist speech (even without the incitement to murder) became off-limits in our culture? Not because extra-sensitive shamers got way out ahead of the rest of the culture and deprived people of access to speech they wanted to hear. In any case, we are so far beyond the imaginary world where there could be a show like that, that I have no idea what strategy I would adopt if something so bizarre came into being.

To make a hypothetical that is enlightening to this discussion, you have to have some speech that there really is currently a big or at least decent audience for, that a lot of people think is worth listening to, and then ask me if I would join you in saying these people should not get what they want. That's what you're doing with Beck. To me, this unwillingness to trust people to hear and think for themselves and to be challenged with additional speech is what characterizes you as anti-free speech.

You're trying to get me to abandon my definition of free speech, but I'm not going to do that. It's funny that your argument is based on what "most people" supposedly think. If the judgment of the people should prevail, why not let the people who want to watch Beck have their Beck? The issue is whether freedom of speech is a high value and where it appears in your hierarchy of values.

Bob said:

Well, IMHO, the purpose of a specific hypothetical in cases like this has nothing to do with its plausibility; the point is to establish the parameters of a person’s general guiding principles. So in this case, depending on how you answered my hypothetical, you’d be saying that either (a) yes, there are at least *some* situations in which you’d adopt the position that (when adopted by me) you call anti-free-speech; or (b) your reluctance to condemn speech, and those who help amplify it, is extreme, and places you among a very small minority of Americans.

So the point is that either (a) I’m anti-free-speech only in the sense that you are; or (b) I’m anti-free-speech only if you adopt a definition of “anti-free-speech” that is held by very few people—which gets us back to my original complaint: your depiction of my views as anti-free-speech was, according to conventional American usage, misleading; for the average American, “freedom of speech” is about the first amendment.

I said:

So the Godwin rule is misguided in your view. I disagree. As I said, when your hypos are off-the-wall implausible, they don't help us think about the real world. I'd have to begin by imagining myself in Crazy World and then come up with a way to think in Crazy World. That might be a fun game, but it's not useful in figuring out what to do in the real world, which is what matters.

My standard free speech answer is going to be in favor of expression, access to expression, and more speech, not repression of speech and not cutting off conversations that are still in play because they offend some other people who think the conversation should have already ended. I'm not against condemning offensive speech, though, as I've said. That's part of the "more speech" remedy to bad speech. I don't think it's very effective speech however. I'd rather see engagement on the merits with people like Glenn Beck, not hollow assertions that he needs to shut up. That's actually counterproductive. People who want to hear him are going to see him as more worth listening too. As Rush Limbaugh loves to say: "The left will tell you who they are afraid of."

So if Google or Facebook, private corporations, took steps to squelch free speech that would just not even make sense to you as a concept because they can't affect free speech since they are not the government? If people organized and regularly showed up at events to shout down speakers they disapproved of, it would be incoherent to urge them to respect free speech.

I realize it irks you to be characterized as anti-free speech, but surely you must realize that is telling me what powerful rhetoric it is. I'm scarcely going to abandon it because it irks you. You are encouraging me to keep using it as a way of saying what I'm trying to say. Why would I back off and adopt a weaker form of expression?

Bob said:

By that logic you should call me a rapist and a child molester! After all, I would protest that allegation, too—and that protest would just show what “powerful rhetoric it is” and would thus “encourage you to keep using it”.

Here’s a hypothetical that, I hope, is plausible enough for you to entertain: If a poll of your readers showed that most of your readers take “anti-free-speech” to mean “in favor of government censorship” *then* would you quit using the term to describe someone who is manifestly not in favor of government censorship? (Don’t worry, I won’t try to conduct any such poll—and I don’t purport to be sure what the results of such a poll would be. I’m just curious….)

I said:

Bob, you are indulging in logical fallacies like mad. If I'm doing something I already choose to do and believe in doing, and you give me an additional reason for doing it, that doesn't mean that I would do other things for the sole reason that was that additional reason. For example, if I love a dress in the store and it fits me, plus it's cheap, so I buy it, that doesn't mean I'd buy other things because they're cheap and nothing more.

Defining terms is a huge part of argument. The notion that a term means what would come in first in a vote on the definition is absurd. What would liberalism or feminism or equality or fairness or any number of important terms mean if the meaning was frozen at the current first definition. Even the dictionary doesn't work that way: there are multiple uses for the same word.

As for the right to free speech, the First Amendment says that "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech." Just on that text alone, you can see that there are 2 different things "the freedom of speech" and the specific direction to Congress not to abridge it. Now, if you say freedom of speech is nothing more than the direction to government not to abridge the freedom of speech, try to picture what the text would need to be: "Congress shall make no law... abridging Congress's proscription against abridging the freedom of speech" which would make no sense at all. The freedom of speech is something which we enjoy, and the Constitution bars Congress's interference with it.

Bob said:

Ann, I’ll bet you thought you had worn me out. Wrong! Although I have to admit that I don’t think I’ll last much longer.

As for your first paragraph: Obviously I’m not saying that you take the vociferousness of someone’s protest against your characterization of their views as the sole criterion for believing your characterization was valid. But for you to take it into account at all—to think that vociferous protests to *any* extent *validate* your characterization of their views—strikes me as odd. When someone tells me I’ve misrepresented their views, I think, “Oh, shit, maybe I did” and then go check to see if I did. I’d sure save a lot of time if I adopted your approach, and took every complaint about my accuracy as a degree of validation.

As for your final paragraph: I gather you’re saying that the authors of the constitution are here suggesting that “freedom of speech” can be constrained by something other than the government (though, actually, this doesn’t quite follow logically from the phraseology; i.e., they’re not literally implying it). That may be true, but it says nothing about whether, more than two centuries after the constitution was written, the phrase “anti-free-speech” has come to mean “in favor of government constraints on speech”.

Speaking of which: You failed to answer my hypothetical about whether, if most of your readers indeed shared this understanding of “anti-free-speech,” you would refrain from applying the term to me. So first you said you wouldn’t answer a hypothetical because it was implausible, and now it turns out you won’t answer plausible hypotheticals either?

That's the last email, dated February 22. Funnily, the conversation began before the Wisconsin protests began and ended 9 days into the real-life, free-speech extravaganza in my neighborhood. I'd like to say I let him have the last word, which sounds gracious, but I can see that Bob left some questions for me that I never answered. Except I think I did answer it. Obviously, I stand by my definition of "free speech," and I wouldn't change my position based on a poll of my readers!

But here's a poll anyway:

Do "free speech" values extend beyond rights held against the government?
	Yes.
	No.
	It's complicated.
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