As you may have already heard, Sarah Palin is now arguing that her rights to free speech are threatened by the fact that the mainstream media is "attacking" her for running a "negative campaign." As Salon's Glenn Greenwald explains, she has the logic exactly backward: actually the first amendment protects the media in making exactly these type of criticisms of government figures. For someone "one heartbeat away from the Presidency" to have such a fundamental misunderstanding of the basic rights guaranteed in the Constitution (limited though those rights are) is, indeed, quite frightening.
See the story at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
http://blogs.abcnews.com/...
You can watch the entire interview at:
http://wmal.com/...
The material on the 1st Amendment is at the beginning of Part II.
The tendency of conservatives to claim victimhood - beginning, perhaps, with claims of "reverse racism" - seems to be accelerating. Many Christian groups similarly claim they are being "persecuted" based on legal moves to remove depictions of the 10 commandments from courtrooms, or other episodes enforcing basic principles regarding the separation of church and state. And now Sarah Palin's 1st amendment rights are threatened because the media makes some criticisms?
As Wendy Brown documents in States of Injury, a growing number of political claims are being advanced in the name of victimhood. This begins with progressive causes (claims of oppression, discrimination and prejudice regarding race, sex, sexual orientation, etc. etc.), but the Right has increasingly adopted this language in advancing their own agenda. Various progressives have also critiqued the language of victimization, particularly but not solely within the feminist movement, saying it creates an image of a person who has no personal agency and who needs outside rescue, thereby empowering the rescuer but not the rescued ("from victim to survivor" goes the saying).
So, where do we stand? How can we successfully make distinctions between "real victimization" and false, and how can we do so while supporting the empowerment of oppressed people? I suspect very few will be sympathetic to Sarah Palin on this issue, but I also suspect that her comments will garner more sympathy from the Right than they deserve. Do we just try to more vigorously assert our claims and disputing theirs, or what can we make of these general trends?