Today, I'll be joining a stellar line-up - Dana Carvey, Bob Saget, Rand Paul, David Spade and Frank Sinatra Jr - for Dennis Miller's seventh anniversary show. There's thousands of talk radio shows but none quite like Dennis' - and none on which you'd find Ron Paul's son and Frank Sinatra's son on the same bill. The fun starts live coast to coast at 12 noon Eastern/9am Pacific.
~Yesterday I checked in with Hugh Hewitt to talk Fort Hood, the shifting balance of power in the Pacific, and the strange wish of Hugh to moderate the Steyn/Scott Brown topless debate. But I also found time to discuss the left's retreat from free speech:
HUGH HEWITT: The McCutcheon decision came down yesterday having to do with money in politics, and everybody on the left is wringing their hands about free speech. Have any of those people who have criticized McCutcheon come to your aid, Mark Steyn, in the assault on your free speech by this fanatical professor?
MARK STEYN: No, they haven't, and one of the things that I find very interesting. Spiked Magazine over in the United Kingdom has just launched a kind of worldwide free speech campaign, and I find it interesting that generally speaking, twenty, thirty years ago, if you stood on a free speech issue, people felt obliged to be in favor of free speech. The left now increasingly is disinclined to defend free speech except, except for the single, solitary exception of American campaign finance.
HH: Exactly.
MS: And that's the only thing where they say well, it's a, you know, free speech, free speech, free speech. Anything else involving free speech, whether it's Phil Robertson, whether it's my troubles with the Canadian Islamic Congress up north, they've got no interest in. But when it's American campaign finance regulation, then suddenly, free speech is of great interest to them.
HH: Yeah, I just noticed that almost every American law professor who can get anyone to pay attention to them, and that's about six, are out there denouncing McCutcheon as a threat to free speech. But while you are actually under a real assault for your speech, you don't get the left in the way that it used to be routine for lefties, and you're absolutely right. Alan Dershowitz and the gang used to saddle up and ride, and the ACLU would come to the aid even to the people with whom they disagreed when it was a speech issue.
MS: Right.
HH: Gone.
More from Hugh's show here. More on the left's discarding of free speech here. And, as the latest example thereof, more on that Mozilla CEO I wrote about the other day here.