SOURCE:
WASHINGTON EXAMINERURL:
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/trump-and-clinton-have-the-same-disdain-for-freedom-just-different-freedoms/article/2593904by: Timothy P. Carney
The two sides, despite what some media coverage may imply, are not equal.
One candidate wants to take away your rights if you're a Muslim, a would-be immigrant or a reporter who does his job.
The other side, meanwhile, has a totally different set of liberties it wants to trample: it wants to curtail the gun rights of law-abiding people, strip the right to bear arms altogether from thousands of people, limit the right to criticize politicians, and force religious people to choose between their consciences and their livelihood.
It turns out that stripping people of their natural rights and their constitutional liberties is something most politicians in both parties really enjoy. The difference is that some people care mostly about one set of rights and freedoms, while other people care mostly about a different set. The 2016 presidential election, and the political reaction to the massacre at an Orlando gay nightclub, have brought this cultural divide into clear view — for those with clear enough eyesight.
"Time for a media gut check about how to cover Trump," tweeted my American Enterprise Institute colleague Norm Ornstein on Monday. "No more both sides are the same!"
Donald Trump had just announced he was revoking all media credentials from the Washington Post. This was in part a thin-skinned reaction to a single misleading story. The Post's Jenna Johnson said Trump accused Obama of having a role in the Orlando attack, while a fairer reading of Trump's rambling would be that he accused Obama of being fine with the Orlando shooting. (Not that that's reasonable either, but such are the nuances of covering Trump.)
Mostly, though, we should understand Trump's attack on the Post as a salvo in the culture war. He knows that many voters feel put upon by the media. Trump voters throughout the country told me this year that they were sick of being told by media elites that they were bigoted for wanting to enforce immigration laws or for holding to a traditional understanding of marriage. They were sick of being lied to, and lied about (witness Katie Couric's dishonest attack on gun owners).
A day before Trump blacklisted the Post, one Trump supporter told me why he appreciates the candidate's attacks on the media: "I feel like they have been attacking me for years. Someone's finally punching back."
Simultaneously and coincidentally, the Post fired its own culture war attacks on a different part of the Bill of Rights. The Wonks at the Post's Wonkblog gleefully pushed out a story stating "The men who wrote the 2nd amendment would never recognize an AR-15," which is either a painfully banal and obvious historical fact, or a puerile ideological argument. (The Founding Fathers who put the right to a free press in the Bill of Rights also wouldn't recognize Wonkblog.) The Post at the same time released its editorials: one knocking Trump for his "assault on our values," and another editorial assaulting the values of others, calling for a ban on "assault rifles," a content-free term.
Gun control efforts are basically culture-war efforts. MSNBC hosts tell us gun owners aren't "normal people." Democratic congressmen say gun control is about battling "Southern areas [that] have cultures that we have to overcome." Washington Post writers call the Second Amendment "the refuge of bumpkins and yeehaws who like to think they are protecting their homes against imagined swarthy marauders desperate to steal their flea-bitten sofas from their rotting front porches."
Beyond banning some guns, most Democrats and liberal commentators these days want to take away the Second Amendment rights of those on a secret federal terror watch-list. There is no due process for getting on this list, and no way to get yourself off it.
Why are liberals being so cavalier about stripping away basic rights, without due process, from a group of people where Muslims are overrepresented? Probably because they don't consider gun ownership a basic right. "The whole idea that bearing arms is a 'civil liberty' is demented," one liberal writer told me last year. This is a theme.
If you wonder why some cultural liberals — both among Democrats and libertarians — wave off concerns about religious liberty, it's because they see opponents of gay marriage as, per se, bad people. That's the same reason some Trump supporters don't value the civil liberties of many Muslims, or at least of Muslims not yet in this country.
Some of us think it's important for all groups, not just media outlets, to be free to criticize the powerful. Hillary Clinton and other opponents of the Citizens United ruling don't like that freedom.
So when Trump goes after the Washington Post, it's correct for the Post, Norm Ornstein and all good people to oppose Trump. But those freedoms less popular among the elite — gun ownership, grassroots criticism of politicians, free exercise of both Christianity and Islam — need defense as well.
Hillary and Donald aren't the same. Clinton has far more experience and qualifications, and a less unsuitable temperament for the job. Here's another difference: Trump tramples on the liberties valued by the elites, whereas Clinton tramples on the liberties despised by the elites.
