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Thursday, October 21, 2010

The Juan Williams Firing

My regular reading list blogs are strangely quiet on the topic of Juan Williams' dismissal by NPR for exercising his freedom of speech. Michelle Malkin has an article; and I don't see anything in my usual reading.  Glenn Beck's new "news site", The Blaze has a decent coverage.

Let me say that I probably agree with 20% of what I've heard him say over the years.  I heard him talking about a book he wrote ("Enough") that sounds almost Bill Cosby-like in his concern for how black families are being destroyed by the welfare culture.  From time to time I've heard other things I agree with, but not often enough to get any real chance of regular agreement.  There are some left-side pundits who go from reasonable to Joseph Stalin when they get hired for a new campaign.  Kirsten Powers comes to mind as one. Williams always struck me as a guy who was a pretty decent human being, just wrong a lot. 

The point is, unless there was an iron-clad clause in his contract that he is not allowed to have personal opinions or not allowed to talk about them as a condition of employment (and nobody is reporting this) Williams should not have been fired from NPR for what he said in his interview with O'Reilly.  In this country, you are allowed to speak your mind.  The First Amendment's protection of speech is meaningless when everyone is saying the same things; it is precisely when that speech is controversial, or upsetting, that the protection is needed. 

This is yet another shining example of the intolerance of the left.  Or the influence of Dr. Evil, George Soros, and his $1.8 Million gift to NPR

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