by digby
I wrote about the controversy surrounding free speech and the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Salon today. I had waited for the inevitable attacks on liberals who had found the magazines cartoons to be offensive or needlessly provocative to be blamed and sure enough it happened. It mostly takes the form of right wing attacks on "political correctness" but there have been more than few of the more centrist variety who have made similar claims. Like Jonathan Chait who even condemned President Obama's former press secretary Jay Carney for suggesting that people not gratuitously offend the religious sensibilities of other people --- something that used to be called "being a nice person" and is now akin to throwing in with terrorists.
It's a complicated subject and I don't think I was entirely successful in tackling it. ( Matthew Yglesias did a better job of it here, I think, although we have different conclusions.) In the end what really concerns me is not the fact that liberals are being blamed for terrorism (again) but that this sort of thing ends up only empowering the people with the real power: authoritarians.
Here's our good friend Michael Hayden, like the cat who licked the cream:
"I was talking to you guys about 12 months ago about these massive amounts of metadata that NSA held in storage. That metadata doesn’t look all that scary this morning ..."
Let's just say that some people are going to get a lot of mileage out of all this and it isn't going to be civil liberties advocates.
Update: read Greenwald's take on this. Very thought provoking.
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