Palin Complains: My First Amendment Rights Are Threatened by Criticism

[marmar]

via AlterNet's PEEK:



Palin Complains: My First Amendment Rights Are Threatened by Criticism

Posted by Rachel Weiner, Huffington Post at 12:16 PM on October 31, 2008.

"If anything, Palin has this exactly backwards, since one thing that the First Amendment does actually guarantee is a free press."



ABC News reports:

In a conservative radio interview that aired in Washington, D.C. Friday morning, Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin said she fears her First Amendment rights may be threatened by "attacks" from reporters who suggest she is engaging in a negative campaign against Barack Obama.

Palin told WMAL-AM that her criticism of Obama's associations, like those with 1960s radical Bill Ayers and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, should not be considered negative attacks. Rather, for reporters or columnists to suggest that it is going negative may constitute an attack that threatens a candidate's free speech rights under the Constitution, Palin said.

"If (the media) convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations," Palin told host Chris Plante, "then I don't know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media."

Salon's Glenn Greenwald explains why this argument is frighteningly wrong:

If anything, Palin has this exactly backwards, since one thing that the First Amendment does actually guarantee is a free press. Thus, when the press criticizes a political candidate and a Governor such as Palin, that is a classic example of First Amendment rights being exercised, not abridged.

This isn't only about profound ignorance regarding our basic liberties, though it is obviously that. Palin here is also giving voice here to the standard right-wing grievance instinct: that it's inherently unfair when they're criticized. And now, apparently, it's even unconstitutional.

According to Palin, what the Founders intended with the First Amendment was that political candidates for the most powerful offices in the country and Governors of states would be free to say whatever they want without being criticized in the newspapers. The First Amendment was meant to ensure that powerful political officials would not be "attacked" in the papers. It is even possible to imagine more breathtaking ignorance from someone holding high office and running for even higher office?

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/105614/palin_complains%3A_my_first_amendment_rights_are_threatened_by_criticism/

[BOSSHOG]

1. Palin = "Profound ignorance" and looking like a whore doing so

[BrklynLiberal]

2. Ok. Then go stand in the corner and hold your breath...

[fourvahl]

5. She has an expert to teach her

how to hold her breath. John McCain as a toddler use to hold his breath until he passed out when he was a child. He then was promptly dropped into cold water afterwards.

Copied from http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/23316912/makebelieve_maverick/print

The youngest McCain was not cut from the same cloth. Even as a toddler, McCain recalls in Faith of My Fathers, his volcanic temper was on display. "At the smallest provocation," he would hold his breath until he passed out: "I would go off in a mad frenzy, and then, suddenly, crash to the floor unconscious." His parents cured him of this habit in a way only a CIA interrogator could appreciate: by dropping their blue-faced boy in a bathtub of ice-cold water.

[BrklynLiberal]

13. Wow! I did not know that!!!

[Gman]

3. Palin wants to have the right to be an idiot and not be called out on it

that right does not exist.

[stewartcolbert08]

7. Exactly

The scary thing is that people are actually inspired by her and going along with what she has to say! Some people are just desperate to belong to something I think.

[BeHereNow]

4. Memo to Palin: 1st Amendment does not protect HATE speech.

Get over it, as your party is so fond of saying.

BHN

[pnwmom]

14. Memo to Palin: 1st Amendment protects the Freedom of the Press

to criticize her however they wish to.

She's got it totally backwards.

[Lil Missy]

6. 1st Amendment was not intended to protect the Gov't from the press, dumbass.

[complain jane]

8. So... she wants to defend my right to

go on television if I ever were to be so lucky and tell the nation what a lying, hypocritical, sleazy, opportunist, racist, hateful, stupid, unprepared, incompetent, bitchy, mean, incapable, pandering, ignorant joke Sarah Palin is?

[Historic NY]

9. can someone stuff a dirty sock in her mouth....please.

[nadinbrzezinski]

10. Can someone PLEASE hand her a Constitution for Dummies?

She obviously cannot handle the real thing.

[bigtree]

11. my 6 year old niece could explain why that's wrong

[dana_b]

12. female Bush

They both have serious learning barriers although I think she's slightly more eloquent but he knows more about the Constitution (especially how to ignore it!).

[Crunchy Frog]

15. Well, she'd better take them to court then.

:crazy: