In Whitewater, a town of about 14,000, there are a few hundred — career bureaucrats, politicians, would-be town squires — who walk around as though they own the place.
The idea that anyone might criticize their views, might question their policies, seems to them an offense against the natural order itself. Unaccustomed to lawful political criticism, and being a self-important and thin-skinned lot, they react to lawful commentary as though someone had just spat on the floor of the Sistine Chapel.
One is encouraged to talk here, about positive developments only, in a stifling, hyper-positive way that sounds like the stilted language of a party propagandist:
Meanwhile, in Washington, the new federal administration is looking more anti-speech by the day. Yesterday, I posted on the Obama Administration’s request to citizens to report other citizens’ criticisms of administration proposals (“Reason.tv: Obama to Citizens on Health Care — Send All Fishy Emails”).
The president himself seems ill-disposed to speech from those he contends ‘created this [so-called] mess’ in health care. The American tradition has genreally embraced the view that the answer to speech is more speech.
That’s not the president’s view, it seems. “But I don’t want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking. I want them to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess. I don’t mind cleaning up after them, but don’t do a lot of talking.”