Slack lets the world go ’round
Micah eloquently makes the case for cutting ourselves some slack. At issue is a blog trying to make a stink over some previous posts by Amanda Marcotte in her Pandagon blog now that she’s been hired by the John Edwards campaign. Says Micah, political operatives and journalists
seem to now want to play “gotcha” over whether something someone said in the past when they were a free citizen of America exercising their free speech and under the employ of no campaign is now the equivalent of an endorsement of that specific speech by a presidential candidate.
If we adopt this standard, then the internet is just going to be a tool for an even tighter straight-jacketing of politics, where no one who ever imagines they might go into politics some time in their life will be willing to ever take a position on anything controversial for fear of damaging their political viability. Yuck! Who wants to live in that world?
Right on.
(Disclosure: I’ve done a little volunteer work for the Edwards campaign.) [Tags: politics forgiveness john_edwards media micah_sifry ]