As if being forced to hear their remake of "Landslide" every time I turn on the radio isn’t bad enough, Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks told a London crowd, "Just so you know, we’re ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas." Imus this morning took no prisoners: "This from someone who I guarantee couldn’t spell ’Hussein’ or find Iraq on a map." I believe it was his sidekick Charles McCord who chimed in that she should have chosen to say that in Dallas, rather than London.
Perhaps we Americans who are proud to be American should voice our opinions where it really hurts, the pocketbooks of those actors and musicians who do not support our country, our president and what this country means, FREEDOM. We can stop buying records, going to the trashy movies they are making, renting the movies and we can stop purchasing the products that sponsor their shows. Sure, all have the right of freedom of speech, but to make remarks like the Natalie "Dixie Chick" made is simply UnAmerican. I too have the freedom not to EVER purchase anything that she earns a penny on. I urge you to do the same.
Are you nuts? Have you lost any concept of what it is to be an American? Criticising our leaders is a time-honored tradition. Did you react this way with those who criticized the last President while our troops were in the field? Did you religiously vote against each and every congressman who said you can "love the country while hating the leader"? If not, then please shut up, read your history, and learn what America is all about.
Response to my American interlocutor:
The only one who seems to be suffering from a selective theory of free speech is you. Ms. Maines is perfectly free to denounce the President, and I am perfectly free to denounce her for being imprudent and ill-informed. And thousands of country music fans--who happen to take verbal assaults on the President in foreign lands while our troops are in harms way seriously--are free to speak with their pocket books by refusing to buy their music. Such is the nature of freedom: Ms. Maines is free to speak the absurd, but she is not immune from the consequences of such speech.
Oh, and next time you impugn someone’s track record, I suggest you actually look it up first. Had you done so, you would have noted that instead of opposing the military actions under Clinton in Kosovo, I actually wrote an article criticizing the Republican Congress for failing to support the action.