Go Ahead Democrats. Insult the President Why Don't You

Here’s how the Washington Post covered the insults to President Bush at the Coretta Scott King funeral.

At one point, the Rev. Joseph E. Lowery, a former head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the group Martin Luther King Jr. helped found, made a reference to not finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The well-heeled, mostly black crowd erupted in a standing ovation.

But at the conservative Washington Times things looked a little different. Of President Carter, not mentioned in the Washington Post article, reporter Joseph Curl wrote:

Halfway through the service, former President Jimmy Carter scolded Mr. Bush for his terror-surveillance program... Mr. Carter later said Hurricane Katrina was a clear sign that racism is still alive in America. Several black leaders have blamed the president for what they consider an insufficient federal response.

And about Joseph Lowery, he wrote:

The Rev. Joseph Lowery, co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and an outspoken civil rights leader, during his speech about Mrs. King ripped into Mr. Bush... “We know now that there were no weapons of mass destruction over there... [T]here are weapons of misdirection right down here.”

Real nice, isn’t it, to insult the President of the United States right to his face.

And you wonder: Did the Washington Post’s light touch on the insults issue from embarrassment over the graceless behavior of Democratic speakers, or did they not even notice the outrage?

This sort of behavior puts the lie to the gospel of political correctness, the doctrine that we should not use speech that hurts, that we should be sanctioned for using “hate speech.”

If we didn’t already know, we ought to know by now. It’s all a political ploy, a trick to deny conservatives their constitutional right to speech. It is all about licensing left-wing speech, however racist, however sexist, however it plays the class warfare card.

What Democrats don’t seem to understand, living as they do in their liberal bubble, is just how clear a message this sort of thing sends to people who aren’t fully committed liberal blue-state Democrats.

The first rule of politics is: Don’t make unnecessary enemies. Especially don’t make enemies of decent middle-class Americans.