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... of Politics
Feb 3/05: Scary, but Richard Cohen and I
are of a mind on this Hamilton business (see entry Feb 2):
Giving In to the Mob
.... There were reasons aplenty not to have invited Churchill
[Univ.
Colorado nutjob who blamed Sept. 11 on the WTC victims] and, once he was
invited, to have rescinded the invitation. Hamilton would not do so. It flung
around the First Amendment with abandon, as if Churchill was a faculty member
whose job was at stake.
.... Hamilton should not have invited Churchill in the
first place. His ideas are trash, cliches to boot, and the school could have
-- as that Catholic school did with me -- changed its mind once it found out
more about him. But once he had accepted, and once Hamilton had insisted by
all that is holy that it would stick to its guns, it could not then collapse
because those ideas, as loathsome as they are, might have real consequences.
Hire some guards. Frisk the audience. But don't cave to the mob.
Right? Well almost.
Almost. For Cohen, the real problem isn't Churchill or his Hamilton College
fan club. They're just annoyances, avoidable and forgettable. For him, the real story
is that right-winged beast with "blood-dripping"
from its "evil heart," Hillary's own VRWC, the "Vast Right Wing
Conspiracy." Churchill is just a mild, meaningless fool, whose little
disturbances ought not have been such a big deal. The real problem is this:
Then Bill O'Reilly struck. The Fox TV commentator went to
town on the controversy, finding the usual liberal idiocy at the usual liberal
college perpetrated by the usual liberal morons. Having rounded up his usual
suspects, O'Reilly ended a segment about Hamilton by providing the name of the
college's president, Joan Hinde Stewart, her e-mail address and the school's
phone number. Then, blood dripping from his evil heart, he asked his deranged
viewers to "keep your comments respectable."
The school caved. Stewart reported getting 6,000 or so messages, and I know,
because I get them all the time, that many of them were vile and obscene and
even threatening. But this is the true cost of free speech. It is not some
rarefied principle, not some slogan, not some trivial right for professors to
abuse in comfortable distance from the targets of their ideas, but the most
powerful and dangerous right of them all. And because O'Reilly had, in effect,
organized an Internet lynch mob, a collection of cyber-goons -- one of whom
threatened to bring a gun -- the school simply junked the program. It
chickened out.
There you have it, my father and I, who wrote emails to
Hamilton are mad vigilantes of the deranged, howling "internet lynch mob."
Lord help us, can't Richard Cohen get it right but once?
I can't wait to tell Dad that he's a "cyber-goon"!
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