Quote:
Originally posted by speeder
The funny thing is, no one here has attacked free speech or suggested that 1st Amendment rights should be curtailed. That is the purview of the Bush administration, these days. So your argument is specious, IMO. The 1st Amendment exists to protect unpopular and/or offensive speech, period. This would be a prime example of such, and I would be the last one to deny her the ability to expose herself and her defenders for what they are by uttering such garbage.
Having a strong, functioning 1st Amendment doesn't change the fact that something is extremely offensive, however, and it is appropriate for other, better people to exercise their right to condemn it.
Get it now? 
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I'm a little dense, but give me time.
I wasn't making an argument, merely an observation on excessive grievances, and the hypocrisy of claiming offense while offending. As I said, look at those leading leftist websites. Or hang out with more hardcore leftists if you want to take the temperature of free speech. My guess if that if you polled those two leftist websites on the subject of shutting down Coulter you would get a response somewhere north of overwhelming. I know, as I ventured into those waters recently on the Democratic Underground in a debate on whether Michelle Malkin should be banned from YouTube. I gently asked the denizens of DU if they felt that Voltaire's injunction on free speech was important to them. That is, the passionate defense of those with whom we disagree is the most important duty of liberals. Within five minutes I had 15 personal emails of unrepeatable nature. Let's just say they were happy with getting rid of her, and blind to the dangers of selective censorship. That they were "offended" was suffcient grounds for silencing her.
Coulter is a twit. So is Michael Moore. Neither offends me. But the taking of offense, and the recruitment of "offense" into the campaign to stifle certain types of speech -- a campaign being aggressively waged on "liberal" college campuses, by the way -- does.
I agree with you, Denis, about letting everybody speak and suffer the cost of their words. But this spirit is not the trend. Every respectable conservative I've read has dissed Coulter for what she said. But when William Aker the NBC "military analyst" recently slandered the troops in the Washington Post, and asserted that they had no right to comlain about media coverage of the war (effectively denying them their free speech rights) not one major liberal voice or media organ corrected him.