San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom in an interview on MSNBC this morning called defeated Democrat Martha Coakley “the victim.”
Democrats love to see victims in every conflict and when the voters defeat them they quickly consider themselves victims of voters who they like to call “angry mobs” and other epithets when the American people don’t support their left-wing agenda.
The danger of this attitude is that Democrat’s next step will inevitably be finding ways to protect the “victim.” They have complained about the influence of talk radio and internet blogs. Today, the failed left-wing radio network Air America filed for bankruptcy again.
More on the Obama administrations attempts to regulate talk radio and internet blogs and control free speech will come in a future post on Florida Pundit.
You can watch the interview with Gavin Newsom here. Fast forward to 5:40 minutes into the interview for the victim remark.
As criticism of Obama increases, the administration’s attacks against Fox News, talk radio and the US Chamber of Commerce become increasingly ominous. We should pay attention and publicize the administration’s statements particularly those by Mark Lloyd, Barack Obama’s “media diversity czar.”
Lloyd is no friend of free speech and has sympathies for Hugo Chavez’ policies of suppressing opposition. In a 2006 book he stated the following:
It should be clear by now that my focus here is not freedom of speech or the press. This freedom is all too often an exaggeration. At the very least, blind references to freedom of speech or the press serve as a distraction from the critical examination of other communications policies.
[T]he purpose of free speech is warped to protect global corporations and block rules that would promote democratic governance.
He likes Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez’s approach to free speech:
In Venezuela, with Chavez, is really an incredible revolution – a democratic revolution. To begin to put in place things that are going to have an impact on the people of Venezuela.
The property owners and the folks who then controlled the media in Venezuela rebelled – worked, frankly, with folks here in the U.S. government – worked to oust him. But he came back with another revolution, and then Chavez began to take very seriously the media in his country.
How far will Obama go if opposition to his policies threatens his Congressional majorities in 2010 and his re-election in 2012?
