Durbin: “I’m sorry if anything that I said caused any offense or pain to those who have such bitter memories of the Holocaust…”
First Draft: “I compared our personnel to the savages who ran death camps in Nazi Germany and Pol Pot’s Cambodia as well as Stalin’s gulags. I was wrong. My irrational statements tore open wounds and cheapened the legacy of millions of innocent victims of tyranny.”

Bill O’Reilly is a shock jock ratings whore.

Sadly, Matt, it’s a view that some very prominent Americans now feel comfortable voicing in the most unmistakeable terms:

And when he [Durbin] went out there, his intent was to whip up the American public against the Bush detainee policy. That’s what his intent was. His intent wasn’t to undermine the war effort, because he never even thought about it. He never even thought about it. But by not thinking about it, he made an egregious mistake because you must know the difference between dissent from the Iraq war and the war on terror and undermining it. And any American that undermines that war, with our soldiers in the field, or undermines the war on terror, with 3,000 dead on 9-11, is a traitor.

Everybody got it? Dissent, fine; undermining, you’re a traitor. Got it? So, all those clowns over at the liberal radio network, we could incarcerate them immediately. Will you have that done, please? Send over the FBI and just put them in chains, because they, you know, they’re undermining everything and they don’t care, couldn’t care less.
—Bill O’Reilly, June 20, 2005

I can understand that many Americans feel that way, and I can also understand partially why they feel that way, but that doesn’t mean that flag-worship or flag-veneration is an apolitical position to take or one that’s widely held elsewhere.

And the same very much does not go for Bush and Cheney. If directly insulting the President and Vice-President of a nation—by burning their effigies, for example—is somehow seen as an insult to the nation rather than just to the individuals or political parties concerned then, frankly, you are already a very long way down the road to fascism.

And I am not using the word in some lazy sense here. Leader-veneration or the view that presidents and vice-presidents somehow stand for a nation or are embodiments of a nation’s character and that insults to them are instults to the nation precisely are features of fascism.

Or is Bush the personal embodiment of the US now? I seem to recall some European nations adopting that view in the 1930s with less than desirable consequences.

Burning Bush and Cheney posters is anti-Bush/Cheney speech, or anti-Republican speech, or anti-conservative speech—but what it certainly is not is anti-US speech.

Further, the view that burning the flag dishonours those who died for it is itself a political view. Taking a particular stance vis a vis the status of a symbol as embodiment of some national or political ideal is not an apolitical act.

Uncle kvetch,
You got me there, 2 wrongs certainly don’t make a right. But an amendment, not yet passed, certainly is not on par with other, worse, restrictions, and just shows that the US isn’t perfect (duh), yet if that is all you can find, it does show that the US is much more permissive than most. And flag burning (for those who oppose it), is for the apolitical reason (mostly) that many people died for that flag and should not be dishonored by burning it. While the end effect is still a disgusting restriction of speech, the results won’t do much to deter anti-US speech (you could still burn those posters of Bush and Chneney), and certainly isn’t targetting any particular group or minority.

It doesn’t seem so, it’s a very classical libel case.
—maria, comment 5 : “Though I do have the impression (primarily from the Yahoo nazi memorabilia case) that freedom of expression is more circumscribed in France than, for example, in the US.”

You may be right, but the Yahoo! example is an epiphenomenon (would be like evaluating freedom of circulation in US territories by focusing on Guantanamo Bay).
—kevin and abb1, comments 10+11, about RSF:

Look at the methodology used in the survey quoted in comment 10, and you’ll understand why RSF’s reputation is as bad as comment 11 states.

From there on discussion has shifted to trolling. Just to let you know, the Grébert case is making a lot of noise here, it’s not just ‘one more case of French media dictature.’

jet: Your trucker strike experience has led you to conclude that the right of the French to protest against their elites is hampered?

FYI: The trial had to be adjourned and will take place in 2006. Reason: the city of Puteaux lawyer is busy defending another member of said elites in a major corruption trial. In the same département. And linked to the same poisonous cabal.

Excellent question, Ray. I can’t find a direct quote from PF on the subject, but the position of the party he founded is pretty clear:

Although a large majority of the Dutch parliament rejected the call by the right wing LPF party (established by the economist Pim Fortuyn, who was murdered in 2002) for a general French-style ban of the hijab, individual court cases dealing with instances of discrimination of Muslim women wearing the headscarf are frequent.

Turns out you don’t have one, beyond “Yeah, well the French are worse.”

Which really doesn’t surprise me in the least.

*Want to guess how Fortuyn would have felt about a headscarf ban?