Shutting down opposition voices

How loud would be the howls of outrage if we got word that the Republicans were organizing gangs of callers to a local radio show to overwhelm a critic of George W. Bush who was being interviewed? And after that, the storm of anger would reach hellish proportions if we found out that Bush supporters were threatening an independent religious organization with an IRS investigation simply because it had invited Senator Obama and Senator McCain to speak and then, when McCain turned them down, still had the audacity to have Obama speak? We can all imagine the editorials and cartoons evoking the jack-booted thugs threatening the First Amendment that we would see in such an event.

But it turns out that, when it is Democrats creating this outrage, the response is just ho hum, move along, nothing of interest here. The Obama campaign first mobilized forces and provided them with talking points to call into WGN talk show host Milt Rosenberg when he had conservative writer Stanley Kurtz on to talk about his research into the Obama record. They did it again when David Freddoso, author of The Case Against Barack Obama, appeared on the show. Think of how many anti-Bush books have been published in the past seven years. And have we ever heard of a mass mobilization effort to shut down a radio station interview with one of the authors? Is this the change we can believe in?

And then there is this distressing farce of a story of how the Democrats sabotaged a Jewish protest against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as he appeared at the United Nations. First the Jewish organization invited both Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton. But when Clinton got word that she would have to appear on the same stage as Palin, she backed out. Apparently, she opposes Iranian nukes but not enough to risk showing up together with the Republican vice presidential candidate. The rally's organizers then invited Joe Biden, but the Obama campaign put the kibosh on that. The Democrats mounted a full-court press against the Jewish groups organizing the rally and, as the local CBS station reports, even threatened them with an IRS investigation if they had Palin and no comparable Democrat, knowing that the Democrats were refusing to show up.

Sources tell CBS 2 HD that a decision to disinvite Palin from the high profile rally after Clinton pulled out in a huff came as the result of intense pressure from Democrats.

"This is insulting. This is embarrassing, especially to Gov. Palin, to me and I think it should be to every single New Yorker," Assemblyman Dov Hikind, D-Brooklyn, told CBS 2 HD.

Sources say the axes were out for Palin as soon as Sen. Clinton pulled out because she did not want to attend the same event as the Republican vice presidential candidate.

"I have never seen such raw emotion -- on both sides," said someone close to the situation.

The groups sponsoring the rally against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaking at the UN were reportedly told, "it could jeopardize their tax exempt status" if they had Palin and not Clinton or Democratic VP candidate Joe Biden on hand.

So all politicians were disinvited, most prominently, Palin.

"It's an absolute shame that this has happened," Hikind said. "To threaten organizations … to threaten the Conference of Presidents that if you don't withdraw the invitation to Gov. Palin we're going to look into your tax exempt status … that's McCarthyism."

Clearly, there would be no tax violation if both parties are invited and only one accepts the invitation. And, as Hot Air points out, last year the politicians attending the rally were almost all Democrats. As Allahpundit writes,

Let’s find out which Democratic lawyers, precisely, arrived at the very novel legal conclusion that inviting both parties to a rally to which only one party RSVPs amounts to politicking in breach of one’s tax exemption. And then let’s ask St. Barack why he couldn’t find one person on his side — apart from the guy who called Palin a Nazi sympathizer a few weeks ago, of course — willing to speak at this rally to “balance” the ticket.

Exit question: Isn’t there something oddly familiar about all this? Exit answer: Yes there is.

The Democrats would prefer to politicize what should be a nonpartisan protest against Iranian nukes and are willing to pull out all the stops, even threatening an IRS investigation, before they allow Sarah Palin to get a bit of publicity by appearing at an anti-Ahmadinejad rally. Rather than show solidarity with Israel against Iran, they'll play some pretty despicable backroom politics. That's how they put party first over country. And all those media people who are so afraid of what the Republicans would do to free and open speech might want to look to how the Obama campaign and its surrogates treat opposition and wonder what such tactics augur for when they had full control of the government and had used that control to pass their Orwellian version of shutting down conservative talk radio in the name of free speech through the Fairness Doctrine.