Goodbye Rush, Sean, and Laura; Goodbye ‘From Sea to Shining Sea’

Conservatives are rightly worried about attempts being made now by liberal Democrats to reinstate the “Fairness Doctrine”. Sounds good, doesn’t it – this “Fairness Doctrine”? The only problem is that it is another attempt to shut up and shut down anyone who doesn’t agree with leftist philosophy.

Let’s look back:
First we have a situation where most of the country does not agree with unlimited abortion. Some states were slowly changing their laws to relax some limitations on abortions, but it was clear that voters and legislatures were highly resistive to any changes. So what do liberals do? They work to put in place activist judges who will ignore the law and ignore the voters – first to proclaim that first trimester abortion is legal – and then they extend it to abortion on demand.

Next we have a situation where, by an overwhelming vote of Congress, responding to an overwhelming demand by the voting public, partial-birth abortion is banned. But is it really banned? No, liberal judges have stymied the will of the people, and enforcement of this ban is in limbo.

Voters in many states went on record to show that the people of America understand the importance and the role of traditional marriage in society and want it protected. So what happens here? In Massachusetts, not only does a liberal court step in and upset the clear desire of the majority of Massachusetts citizens, but the liberal Massachusetts legislature violates the law and obstructs a legal attempt to put the issue before its citizens in a Constitutional referendum. This same kind of thing happens over and over again in California.

I have already written at length about how, on college campus after college campus, any attempt by conservative speakers to put forth viewpoints at odds with leftist orthodoxy is met by tactics that Stalin and Hitler would have admired. Speakers are attacked and shouted down, professors are denied tenure, and students who question the ‘hate America’ line are routinely flunked.

The relationship of all this to the “Fairness Doctrine” is that a wonderful thing has been happening in America over the past 20 years. No longer are we trapped in a box where only the liberal spoutings of the broadcast networks and the rest of the mainstream press can be heard (in 1992, 89 percent of Washington journalists voted for Bill Clinton; in 1996 the figure was 92 percent). When the “Fairness Doctrine” was thrown out, talk radio came into its own, but, strangely, in the main, only conservative radio hosts became popular and succeeded. They gave a voice for the first time to the ‘silent majority’. The internet exploded as well, and we also got Fox News to provide balanced reporting for a change.

This new ability of conservative viewpoints to be heard has now so alarmed liberals that they want to shut it down. They want to impose the “Fairness Doctrine” and require opposing points of view always to be presented. They want to do what they always do. They know they can’t compete on the basis of logic and facts. They know they can’t win an argument honestly. They know that the systems they tout have failed everywhere they have been tried, and that America is the greatest success story in the history of the world. The “Fairness Doctrine” will mean the end of most talk radio shows and the end of weblogs like mine. Dennis Kucinich and Bernard Sanders are the new architects of the “Fairness Doctrine”. Need I say more?

Final Note: Perhaps when the Democrats wake up to the likelihood that their “Fairness Doctrine” will also shut down Moveon.org and DailyKos.com, this will all fade away. Les Aspin, Clinton’s first SecDef once tried to prevent our troops from listening to Rush Limbaugh. He had to spend the rest of his days hiding under his desk.