Horowitz, O'Reilly, Scarborough and Crew: An End Run Around the First Amendment
Press Action
Wednesday, February 09, 2005
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/nimmo02092005/
By Kurt Nimmo
It is so magnanimous of David Horowitz to not call for the firing of Ward Churchill, CU professor, for expressing his opinion, protected under the First Amendment to the Constitution. David believes Churchill’s rights under the Constitution are sacrosanct, as well he should, and the professor, who Horowitz deems a “self-declared ally of our enemies in the terrorist war,” a miscreant embracing opinions that are “offensive, idiotic or evil,” should be fired because he “is not really a Native American as he claims.”
Horowitz is not stupid. He knows better than to attack the First Amendment, as does his collaborator, Bill O’Reilly, because the careers of Horowitz and O’Reilly are firmly rooted in the Bill of Rights.
Naturally, freedom of the press is limited to those who own one, for instance Fox News, where O’Reilly toils, and the Center for the Study of Popular Culture (CSPC), Horowitz’s organization, well-oiled with right-wing foundation money from the likes of the Richard Scaife foundation, the Olin foundation, and the Carthage foundation. As for Mr. Scaife’s opinion on the nature of a free press and open inquiry, when the reporter, Karen Rothmeyer of the Columbia Journalism Review, asked Scaife about his funding of reactionary groups, such as Horowitz’s CSPC, he replied, ever so graciously, “You fucking communist cunt, get out of here,” according to Al Franken (see Right Web’s profile on Richard Mellon Scaife). Last year, attempting to have my name removed from Horowitz’s email list—I am not sure how I ended up on that list, but there it was—I received likewise treatment, complete with similar opprobrium, sent to me by a Horowitz sycophant.
Debating the likes of Horowitz and O’Reilly, supposedly in the spirit of the First Amendment, is an exercise in futility. In such instances, the First Amendment becomes a cudgel, or more accurately a wide brush devised to paint the “self-declared [allies] of our enemies in the terrorist war” as traitors, betrayers, and fifth columnists.
Earlier today, I received an email from Tom Young, apparently a producer for MSNBC, who suggested “transporting [me] to a satellite uplink of some nature” and thus joining in “a live discussion/debate regarding the controversy over Ward Churchill’s remarks,” in other words, MSNBC wanted to use me as a foil in a “debate” with a foregone conclusion.
I politely declined.
Obviously, there is no reason to partake in a “discussion/debate” hosted by MSNBC, owned by the likes of Microsoft, a corporation, almost nearly a monopoly, that donated 2.4 million to get Bush “elected,” and NBC, a corporate media behemoth with holdings in General Electric, the world’s largest corporation by market share that manufactures jet and helicopter engines for Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and other military aircraft makers, criminal organizations complicit in the murder of 100,000 or more Iraqis.
According to reactionary radio talk show host, Bob Newman, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough has joined the growing demand that Ward Churchill be arrested and tried for treason under U.S. Code Title 18, Section 2381, a statute carrying the death penalty. Scarborough, a former Republican Congress critter “representing” Florida, has framed MSNBC’s take on the Churchill witch hunt.
For instance, Scarborough gathered together Republican strategist Karen Hanretty and the swaggering hatemonger Ann Coulter to “discuss” Ward Churchill on his Scarborough Country program. Said Coulter in standard and all-too predictable fashion, “These guys [college professors] want to go around acting like big radicals, getting laid by coeds with hairy armpits who probably don’t like men, by going to conferences and saying, ‘Oh, yes, I’m the one who said that.’”
Naturally, Ann has another book to sell, struggling upward on the best seller list to outdo the likes of Mireille Guiliano, number one author on the Amazon list of non-fiction books. Guiliano wrote a socially relevant book, obviously pertinent to so many Americans, “French Women Don’t Get Fat: The Secret of Eating For Pleasure.”
Thus the debate is framed and anything I would have to add—via the Bush Ministry of Disinformation, MSNBC division—would be grist for the reactionary mill of intolerance, grinding away methodically to take out those who disagree, beginning with an obvious target choice, the firebrand Ward Churchill. Obviously, Mr. Young wanted me to serve as an arch nemesis contra the Horowitz, O’Reilly, Scarborough and crew take on Churchill. In such situations, you are yelled down and not allowed to get a sound bite in edgewise.
Horowitz, O’Reilly, Limbaugh, Scarborough, et al, the far right field hit squad, will begin with academics, calling for “diversity” (as Horowitz would have it) on college campuses, but their jihad against the opposition—almost entirely unrepresented in the corporate media, and hardly a blip on the cultural radar screen at large—will not be satisfied to have simply professors dismissed and careers ruined.
Horowitz claims to cherish the First Amendment and yet his allies—including Lynne Cheney, Bill Bennett, Daniel Pipes and, oddly, the National Association of Scholars—will not rest until the “anti-flag, anti-family, anti-America, class warfare” Left, as Newt Gingrich would have it, who are “pathetic, permissive, promiscuous, perverted, radical, selfish, sick, spineless,” are put out of action permanently (see this reference to Gingrich’s 1990 GOPAC training manual for right-wing activists, where the previous adjectives are listed and encouraged for handy use).
As for the aforementioned National Association of Scholars, in a statement entitled “September 11 and Academic Freedom," they declare “many professors and journalists regard intellectual freedom less as an end in itself, than as a means of protecting the adversary culture,” in other words opposition to Bush’s plan for “generational war,” once again making headlines today as Condi Rice threatens both Syria and Iran in the same sentence.
It is not simply academics who are falling between the crosshairs of the reactionary and intolerant far right, but journalists and ultimately all with a voice who protect and participate in “the adversary culture,” for as Lynne Cheney declares, in now habitual Manichean fashion, “when a nation’s intellectuals are unwilling to defend its civilization, they give comfort to its adversaries,” even when that “civilization” violates international law at random, murders civilians (as in Fallujah), constructs a torture and rape gulag (with Abu Ghraib and Camp Gitmo as the template), and conducts chemical warfare (namely, the use of depleted uranium) against the unborn (and these folks hate abortion) in Iraq, Afghanistan, and soon Iran and Syria.
Finally, when considering Horowitz and his ilk, so careful to protect Ward Churchill’s First Amendment right in their own self-interest and self-service of careers, Oscar Wilde’s comment that “patriotism is the virtue of the vicious” comes to mind.
It is patriotic to declare Churchill’s civil liberties inviolable and yet demand—as Bob Newman and, apparently, the governor of Colorado and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough demand in unison—that he be put on trial for treason. It is, all told, viciousness motivating these people and an inability to tolerate opposition to the insanity of mass murder and endless war.
But then, if Oscar was alive today, no doubt he would be chalked up not only as a proponent of the “adversary culture,” but denounced as “pathetic, permissive, promiscuous, perverted, radical, selfish, sick” because, as we know, he was gay.
Kurt Nimmo is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He is the author of Another Day in the Empire: Life in Neoconservative America, a collection of essays published by Dandelion Books. Visit his weblog at KurtNimmo.com.