"A response to Andrew Sullivan" - By Salon's Managing Editor, Re: Bush Assassination Cartoon

WAHOO!!

"How far do the bounds of free speech reach, and so forth"

I WON I WON!! I called it! What's my prize? There's gotta be a prize!!

There is a prize, isn't there?

Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, William Jefferson Clinton. What do they have in common? All champions of "Freedom of Speech" < /sarcasm >

The legal aspect has nothing to do with this, that is a red herring. Sullivan's objection said nothing about legality, and Salon's explanation said nothing about legality, and said nothing about being above the law.

Addressing that issue though, it is not illegal to simply discuss the assination of a president. It is illegal to make threats. This comic did not imply a threat, and as he said, it treated it as a bad thing.

Look, Sullivan and some freepers have acted overly-sensitive about this, as if the comic was suggesting that shooting Bush was a good thing. It simply did not do that. We do ourselves no credit by seeming to be unreasonable. It's like the boy who cried wolf. It undermines our credibility when we have a legitimate gripe.

Agreed. This is a tempest in a teacup.

True. How about if we go after Salon for hiring cartoonists so untalented that readers have a hard time even interpreting what they're trying to say?

I would link to it but Sullivan's Web site uses frames in such a clumsy way that linking to individual items is impossible

Not for intelligent boys and girls.

Agreed, Richard. Even if one sits down and analyzes the cartoon carefully - something its feeble left-wing content scarcely merits - it's offensive and the sentiments behind it are clearly disturbing. Had it been directed at Clinton, the Reno Justice Department would already have had its minions breaking down the door.

Salon is sinking under its own tedious weight. And hiring lame cartoonists like the twit (okay, twittess) who thinks she's being real kewl and subversive by prattling the liberal line is one of the reasons for this.

-- in a nightmare sequence --

Weasel words.

(This is mainly a cut-and-paste post from the other thread; if you've read the other thread's many posts in full, you may skip this one; I've done only minor editing.)

"It started out well" means the BEGINNING of the dream, not the end that woke the cartoonist up. You're correct and Andrew Sullivan is wrong.

The strip didn't delve into things political prior to 9/11. It never *was* particularly FUNNY but sometimes it was *true*. Here is an example:

I loved a Carol Lay strip called UNHAPPYLAND. It was about a guy who from time to time had to take this miserable bus to a "theme park" called Unhappyland. He'd get stuck in the "Veil of Tears" ride, spend days on end in the "PIt of Despair," and so on. It said everybody had to go there now and then. Well, that's true enough. Even if you dont' tend to get depressed, you've still been in Unhappyland a few times.

One day this guy decides he ain't going, and he pulls the cord on the bus, and the driver lets him off. Suddenly he's being greeted by loved ones who predeceased him, and the sign over the beautiful estate beyond says "HEAVEN" and "VACANCY." The boxover says something like, "Good thing the rest of them don't know they can get off the bus, or everyone would do it." Anyway, I loved that particular strip; it seemed so true and so profound, indeed! I know that what comes after this life is so much better than what we're plugging through now! I don't think Unhappyland is exclusive; conservatives are more than welcome, alas.

So: I was a fan; I braved the slums of Salon to go every Tuesday and read this strip. I liked 101 Demons, too, before that writer's horrid election strip. Note the use of the past tense. I was a fan. While I don't believe that Ms. Lay wants the President shot, I nonetheless don't have time to read liberal irony (it isn't humor, that's for sure.)

Once upon a time my parents collected Streisand music. Now, they cannot listen to her. Celebrities and entertainers of all stripes make fearful mistakes when they decide to crusade for a very divisive cause. Animal rights? Generally they can get away with that. World hunger? AIDS? Great. We will generally keep buying their records, reading their books, and watching their movies if they adopt such causes. But to militantly embrace liberalism is to lose audience. I imagine that the few prominent conservative entertainers sacrifice some fans too. I suppose it doesn't matter much if you've made and properly invested your millions and you're losing your voice anyway. SOMEHOW I DOUBT CAROL LAY HAS THE MEANS TO OVERCOME P.O.'ing HALF OF AMERICA. (Assuming that many knew she was alive and wrote a comic strip.)

"Weasel words."

LOL..........yeah, they are, aren't they?

The legal aspect has nothing to do with this, that is a red herring. Sullivan's objection said nothing about legality, and Salon's explanation said nothing about legality, and said nothing about being above the law.

Oh, I never meant to imply that was Sullivan's take on it; I'm just saying it's my take.

Addressing that issue though, it is not illegal to simply discuss the assination of a president. It is illegal to make threats. This comic did not imply a threat, and as he said, it treated it as a bad thing.

Well, I still disagree about the last sentence; as I've already posted, the dialogue in the cartoon is vague enough that one can make either argument:

1) That the part she "liked starting out" was the entire first three panels, where Bush said something that went against his "controllers" and got shot, and the part she considered the "nightmare" was merely when Bush woke up from his own dream of being shot and decided "Today I will gut the Bill of Rights!"

2) That the part she "liked starting out" was only the first two panels, where he was using his bully pulpit to urge Americans to use less oil, and the nightmare was the entire rest of it before she woke up.

As to the illegality of what she wrote/drew: Yes, it's only illegal to make a credible threat. However, the reality is that the Secret Service practices "zero tolerance" for such things, and also that angry liberals of all stripes took advantage of this fact constantly during the Clinton years, including Saloners themselves. We all remember how the occasional psychotic newbie used to show up on FR and say something stupid about how he "wished Clinton were dead" or somesuch. Of course, these people had their posts yanked and were banned almost instantaneously. But the Salon Table Talk crowd was filled with people who were obsessed with FR, and they would scan FR threads 24/7 looking for just those sorts of posts. We used to be amazed at how they managed to discover, save, and then publicize these sorts of threatening posts even when they were live for less than two minutes, so it had to be some sort of loose organization to it on their end. Mainly they just wanted to be able to falsely tar all Freepers with the label of "extremist" - standard-issue Clintonian politics of demonization tactics - but they also almost invariably called in the Secret Service on those people as well, even when the "threats" were as vague as in this comic. Even though, to my knowledge, there has never been a single post on FR that the Secret Service considered a truly SERIOUS THREAT, or anything at all more than empty blathering. But they got visits, because the Secret Service doesn't take chances. If you talk about it, they have to check you out to make sure it's just talk.

And yet now, when Salon itself does the exact same thing, they suddenly play the "freedom of speech" card. Only the little people are subject to the Secret Service's zero tolerance, not Members of The Media. And I say to hell with that.

We do ourselves no credit by seeming to be unreasonable. It's like the boy who cried wolf. It undermines our credibility when we have a legitimate gripe.

I understand your point. It's just that given that Salon's own credibility is nil, and that there are so few of them left (both in terms of Salon staffers and readers, and in terms of angry Bush-haters), I think the need for equal treatment under the law trumps the need for us to keep from looking like we're "crying wolf," even if you're absolutely right about the cartoon's meaning and I'm totally wrong. It just doesn't matter to me if a couple dozen people that already despise us with every fiber of their beings end up hating us a little bit more. They shouldn't be allowed to escape the scrutiny that any one of us would absolutely have gotten if we'd done such a thing myself. If I ran my own little web site blog, and I drew a cartoon that was word-for-word the same as Carol Lay's, I absolutely 100% believe the Secret Service would have ended up paying me a visit. And I believe Salon's editors know this, actively considered it, and decided, "Well, we're famous journalists putting out a well-known, respected publication. So the feds will know we don't really mean it." And I despise that elitist attitude, and believe it should be fought whenever and whereever possible.

You do have to admit that the homosexual makes it hard to link to his page.

Yeah, it is an amazingly badly designed site, and always has been. (And he's been saying a better redesign has pretty much been ready since July or something, but "they" (whoever "they" are) hadn't had time to move all the files over or anything. How long can it possibly take?) But Scott Rosenberg is no Internet newbie. He has to know at least very basic HTML and how to interpret a page source file. So to call it "impossible" is a bit much. My grandmother would find it impossible, but he shouldn't.

I wasn't defending every word Rosenburg wrote or ever wrote. I was pointing out that Sullivan misinterpreted the strip to be something it was not. The description offered by Salon in their defense was accurate, and THAT is the only issue.

Your personal insults are noted and say more about you than than anyone else.

Carol Lay makes Tom Tomorrow look like Thomas Nast.

You do have to admit that the homosexual makes it hard to link to his page.

Sullivan does a lot of good work for the conservative cause. This kind of unfunny cheap shot makes no sense.

Hey, maybe I'll write a story about a non-temple going, leftist jew who runs a loser website and his kids get snached by pickup driving klansmen. Very funny. Ha,ha,ha. Free speach and all. Think Solon will run it if it is done well and provacative and "gets people thinking?"