What About Free Speech?

WASHINGTON -- For a couple of years now, I have been talking about the Kultursmog, the utterly polluted state of our political culture. Those who pollute it are the liberals. Kultursmog is the only form of pollution that they approve of, but they do approve of it mightily, and of course, they are the chief contributors to its noxious fumes. Now they are using it to kill off an American value prized by millions of Americans down through the centuries, free speech. As I say in another context, we are watching the death of liberalism.

Through Media Matters for America, MSNBC, Think Progress and various other outfits, the liberals are trying to kill off talk radio. They have made feints in this direction for years -- for instance, in encouraging the return of the Fairness Doctrine, which is anything but fair. Now they are aiming at the heart of talk radio, Rush Limbaugh, and, as collateral damage, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and the whole conservative camorra. As I mentioned last week, Rush -- in the course of his 15 hours of dialogue each week -- made a joke of dubious jocularity about the felicitously named Sandra Fluke. All hell broke loose. To my surprise -- and I suspect to Rush's -- it turns out that his joke was almost tasteful and indeed elevated in comparison with the tasteless scurrility directed at conservative women.

The clown Bill Maher called Sarah Palin a "dumb t---" and a "c---." He jokes about Rick Santorum's wife using a vibrator. Ed Schultz has called Laura Ingraham a "right-wing slut," anticipating Rush's reference to Fluke. Keith Olbermann is as foul, and doubtless there are others. This is the language regularly resorted to by the left, and one would think that these revelations would put an end to the orchestrated crisis over Rush, especially because it was a liberal, the admirable Kirsten Powers, who turned up these instances of garbagespiel. But no, the crisis continues.

I can understand why. Talk radio is almost exclusively conservative radio. For some reason, liberals cannot make it in the talk show market. Even when they come up with heavily subsidized formats, such as Air America, the liberals flounder. This is, I suspect, because they cannot talk about politics without assuming a grim voice and interlacing their dialogue with scatological references. Have you ever heard them? Have you read their blogs? They have sewers for brains.