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EVERY American Don Giovanni loves free speech -- for

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EVERY American shares don giovanni mozart loves free don giovanni libretto diagnoses speech -- for themselves. We think the other guy should shut up and sit down. We all believe our own views are frank and provocative, things that need to be said. The other guy's ideas are deceitful and offensive, usually the product of mental deficiency, corruption or simply a malevolent nature. When it comes to speech, winnowing the wheat from the chaff clearly is no task for the timid, so perhaps we all should breathe a collective sigh of relief over the United States Congress' willingness to accept the arduous duty of arbitrating what now constitutes appropriate political speech. Recently, for example, the House and Senate censured the liberal activist group MoveOn . org for taking out a newspaper advertisement that characterized Gen David H Petraeus, the U. S. military commander in Iraq, as "General Betray Us. " Now congressional Democrats are seeking a similar expression of disapproval for radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, who they allege insulted servicemen and women opposed to the Iraq war by calling them "phony soldiers. " (Limbaugh has a baroque explanation of what he actually meant by those words, but you probably have to be a regular listener to his show to follow it. )There's a temptation to dismiss all this as hollow foolishness -- like most of the things Congress does with ease.

Beyond all this preposterous posturing, though, there are a couple of things worth considering because both really do involve free speech and your right to hear it. Now, the MoveOn. org ad was patently offensive, a particularly unconscionable slur on any honorable American in uniform, let alone a guy who commanded the 101st Airborne don giovanni losey . It was, however, rejected out of hand as an expression of loony narrow-mindedness by most Americans who oppose the war don giovanni opera . Nobody, in other words, needed a congressional coalition -- not even a bipartisan one -- to instruct them on how to think don giovanni translation . Similarly, it's possible that the Democratic leadership is sufficiently clueless not to have noticed until now that Limbaugh regularly goes on the air and says cruel and offensive things about people of all sorts don giovanni commendatore . Most Americans with a pulse, however, are abundantly clear on the fact that Rush talks a pretty mean game. Congress, in other words, has no legitimate role to play in the regulation of political speech -- and both MoveOn. org and Limbaugh were engaged in that constitutionally protected activity. The House and Senate simply make themselves appear more ridiculous than usual when they overreach in this silly fashion. So what is all this really about?Partly, it's an attempt to capture and hold the rhetorical high ground in our endless and increasingly sterile non-debate over the debacle in Iraq. The war, however, has congressional attention mostly because of its domestic implications, and the clubfooted dance over Petraeus and Limbaugh is about free speech only insofar as that speech will have an effect on the next election. And that brings us to what's really on the congressional mind, which is talk radio and the Fairness Doctrine. ASK most Americans what the Fairness Doctrine is and they'll correctly tell you it's a regulation that requires broadcasters to air both sides of an issue.

Tell them that it hasn't been enforced since 1987, when the Federal Communications Commission essentially deregulated broadcasting and abolished the doctrine, and they'll look at you like you're nuts giovanni don . That is, however, the situation, and much that is of current consequence flows from it -- including the existence of contemporary talk radio of which Limbaugh is the avatar. In America today, talk radio is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party's conservative wing don giovanni synopsis Don Giovanni - wikipedia Don Giovanni - metoperafamily . Don Giovanni tickets GOP partisans will argue that's because deregulation subjected radio to the discipline of the marketplace, and, when that market expressed itself through ratings, it stated an overwhelming preference for conservative talk-show hosts don giovanni movie. That's a good, Reagan Era argument, but Democrats and their allies see different forces at work don giovanni peter sellars Don Giovanni . They point to the fact that deregulation freed big corporations to acquire hundreds of radio stations at about the same time that satellite transmission made syndicated radio programming decisively cheaper than locally produced shows.