Video: Crazed by Rush, Wes Clark calls for political discourse to be rated

He doesn’t say who’ll be doing the rating but he digs the idea of Congress yanking Rush Limbaugh off of Armed Forces Radio so presumably they’d be okay to head that up, too. The point he’s ostensibly trying to make is a simple one — that the U.S. government shouldn’t be broadcasting anything that harms its own military’s morale — but a standard that narrow wouldn’t let you regulate very much speech. So he broadens it with a magnificently Orwellian invocation of “propriety” that has no discernible definition except his own arbitrary judgment about what does and doesn’t “cross the line.” Just laying a little groundwork for the Fairness Doctrine, planting a few seeds which he hopes will flower a few years from now.

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It’s not worth rehashing at this point that the whole thing is based on a willful distortion of Limbaugh’s “phony soldiers” comment aimed at Jesse Macbeth. Both sides realize that. Clark’s simply trying to leverage a trumped-up controversy for political gain — which adds a special poignancy to the part where he scolds Congress for trying to leverage a trumped-up controversy for political gain.

Stick with it or else you’ll miss him walking into the debate equivalent of a straight right hand to the jaw when he claims no liberal commentator would accuse someone on the other side of being unpatriotic. Wes Clark, Rhodes Scholar.

Exit question: They’re having a good week, huh?

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