Bill Clinton, easily among the most immature, do-nothing presidents the United States has ever had, really ought to quit buzzing around the nation on behalf of speech-suppression and self-aggrandizement.
He’s against the First Amendment, you know. Wants to bag the thing. Toss it overboard.
Asked on a liberal Talk Radio show recently about the Fairness Doctrine, Clinton said “well, you either ought to have the fairness doctrine or you ought to have more balance on the other side, because essentially there has always been a lot of big money to support the right-wing talk shows.”
Sure, he and other Democrats who speak glibly of restoring the Fairness Doctrine say it’s “balance” they want on radio programs, and no doubt they do – the kind of balance that would put Rush Limbaugh out of business.
They might try reading the amendment, which says Congress “shall make no law . . . abridging freedom of speech,” not that it shall assure that somehow every side of an issue will get heard.
The Founders used this language for a reason. They knew that any government regulation of what gets said could be used to quiet critics. While theirs was a time of one-sided, often vitriolic pamphleteering, they figured quite correctly that this outspokenness could be antidote to governmental waywardness and that the best means of assuring differing points of view was simply to allow them.
The Democrats yelp that radio is different because the airwaves are limited and publicly owned, but that’s been a phony, Constitution-ignoring argument from the start and is especially ridiculous at a time when radio voices abound and there is an immense variety of other opinion outlets from cable TV to the Internet.
True enough, talk radio is more conservative than not, and I know that sends shivers up the backs of some, but liberal views are in fact heard frequently there and liberalism dominates newspapers, magazines, Hollywood, the academic world and network TV even in supposedly straight reporting that ought to aim for objectivity.
This incursion on free speech would be one of the gravest civil rights affronts of modern America, and Clinton should be ashamed for the dalliance with despotism. Of course, the man knows no shame.
As much was made clear when he also said in a recent interview that if he and his great economic team had been in power instead of George W. Bush the past eight years, we wouldn’t be facing the present economic crisis.
It’s interesting, isn’t it, that this miracle-working team did not work miracle enough to prevent the “dot-com bubble?” You may recall that it got going during his first term as investors bet big-time bucks on unproved Internet companies and began its decline during his last year in office, causing headaches aplenty.
More importantly regarding the point at hand, we now know that a factor in the current economic crisis was the government’s role in prompting and allowing mortgage loans to bad risks and that Clinton himself happily joined this venture into chaos.
From New York Times stories, we are reminded how he went along with Henry Cisneros, his secretary of Housing and Urban Development, in a massive national program to loosen “mortgage restrictions so first-time buyers could qualify for loans they could never get before,” and that the that the administration pressured Fannie Mae to extend mortgages to people who would not ordinarily qualify.
There was some worry even then that the Fannie Mae policy could eventually lead to a governmental bailout, but that apparently did not faze Clinton anymore than offshore terrorist attacks moved him to any steps decisive enough to help deflect 9/11 or the entitlement mess moved him to address that major issue.
He did some good things, but his administration was mostly noted for a scandal, and what he owes us now at the very least is a sense of decency in what he says.
Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at: [email protected].
