For most of our history -- until very recently -- it was more often than not American liberals who stood in the watchtowers to defend dissent, both theoretically and functionally, e.g., Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Lucy Stone, Frederick Douglass, Mother Jones, Maurice Garvey, Woody Guthrie, Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, Abbie Hoffman and Cindy Sheehan.
However, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was asked at a Christian Science Monitor press breakfast in June whether she would support efforts to keep the talk radio-killing Fairness Doctrine from being re-established, the speaker replied without hesitation: "The interest in my caucus is the reverse," and Rep. "Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) has been active behind this (revival of the Fairness Doctrine) for a while now."
"Do you personally support revival of the Fairness Doctrine?" Pelosi was asked. "Yes," she replied spontaneously.
Now, there is no ambiguity about this issue. The Fairness Doctrine would require every show to be balanced in its political opinion, thus ending the viability of any business plans for a successful -- either liberal or conservative -- radio host. But because almost all successful talk radio shows are conservative, liberal Democrats are trying to kill it. They have been explicit. They say they want to take Rush Limbaugh's voice off the radio, as well as the voices of other leading conservatives.
For sheer shabbiness and moral squalor, it is hard to improve on Pelosi's revealing words: "The interest in my caucus is the reverse." She offers not even an obeisance to a principled argument, just the raw political fact that free speech and dissent via talk radio is not in the "interest" of her parliamentary "caucus."
The downward path of liberalism can be charted from the martyr's sacrifice of Martin Luther King to the political bully's grunt of Pelosi. Liberalism, once the champion of man's noblest human instinct for political freedom, is now just a self-admitted machine for power accumulation.
I suppose the rotating of liberalism and conservatism into the power of national office gives each cause the opportunity, in its turn, to relearn the honor of defending dissent in a representative republic such as ours. Now it is the turn of the conservatives. So as the liberals leave the watchtowers of freedom, conservatives are taking up our duty.
Among the new occupants in the watchtower is the Media Research Center, which has formed the Free Speech Alliance to defend dissent by organizing a grass-roots opposition to the re-enactment of the Fairness Doctrine.
Tony Blankley
Tony Blankley, a conservative author and commentator who served as press secretary to Newt Gingrich during the 1990s, when Republicans took control of Congress, died Sunday January 8, 2012. He was 63.
Blankley, who had been suffering from stomach cancer, died Saturday night at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, his wife, Lynda Davis, said Sunday.
In his long career as a political operative and pundit, his most visible role was as a spokesman for and adviser to Gingrich from 1990 to 1997. Gingrich became House Speaker when Republicans took control of the U.S. House of Representatives following the 1994 midterm elections.
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