Nat Hentoff is a First Amendment absolutist. In his column today, he comes to the defense of the grass roots who have come out at the town halls to challenge Obamacare, and who are so scorned by the MSM. From his column:
Startlingly — and wholly involuntarily — President Obama is teaching us that, as Thomas Jefferson often said, “the people are the ultimate guardians of their own liberty.” The growing resistance to the president’s goal of state-controlled health care is moving more of us to act on our constitutional power to protect our quintessential individual liberty — to decide for ourselves how long we are going to stay on this Earth.
The reverberating town-hall meetings are a legacy of the 1765 meeting in Boston where Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty organized against King George III and, not having access to the Internet, later started the Committees of Correspondence that alerted all the colonists to insistent royal threats to their personal liberties. During a secret meeting in Virginia, Jefferson helped organize such a committee in his state.
Or, as today’s Left used to be so enamored of before they were in charge, people speaking truth to power.
Hentoff points out that physicians have been organizing, as have physicians’ wives, referencing my recent trip to Louisville. And he presents cogent reasons to oppose health care reform that could treat us as members of categories, veritably shouting in print:
We are all individuals!
Right on, Nat. Right on.
