Thanks once again to The Other McCain and Pirate’s Cove for the Rule Five links!

Moving on:  Howard Dean is a fucking idiot.  Excerpt:

Here we go again: Former Democratic National Committee chairman tweeted that “hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment.” As Dean—who once ran for president of the United States—should know, this is completely wrong.

Dean’s tweet was a response to another tweet from a former New York Times reporter who pointed out that Ann Coulter once joked about how Timothy McVeigh should have blown up The NYT instead of a federal building. Coulter is in the news because the University of California-Berkeley cancelled her planned visit to campus on grounds that administrators could not guarantee her safety—irate protesters have vowed mob violence if she speaks. The university has now reversed that decision, thankfully.

Coulter’s history of engaging in hate speech might be a reason for students not to invite her to speak. But her speech, hateful though it may be, is not illegal. The Constitution does not exempt “hate speech” from First Amendment protection.

The First Amendment is pretty damn clear.  And if freedom of expression doesn’t include the unpleasant and, yes, the hateful, then it doesn’t mean anything at all.

Especially when many on the fringe Left think hate speech is “anyone who disagrees with me.”

Freedom of expression means you have to let the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis have rallies.  It means you have to let Louis Farrakhan ramble on about mother ships and white devils.  It means you have the freedom to say and write any damn thing you please, right up to the point where you do harm to another person or infringe on another person’s right to express themselves.  Otherwise – if you only allow conversations about kittens, flowers and butterflies – there really is no freedom of expression, and the First Amendment is just meaningless blab.

Howard Dean couldn’t be more wrong.