Waterboarding Free Speech to Death

I'm sick and tired of the damned intolerance of the LEFT toward any conflicting opinion, idea or thought. Why must opposition (from the left or the right) seek to absolutely SILENCE any dissenting opinion?

The LEFT WING THOUGHT POLICE, aided by the DAILY KOS and dozens of left wing blogs, claimed another victim this past week with the firing of conservative columnist Rachel Marsden from the Toronto Sun.

The ONLY GOAL of these coordinated left wing bloggers was her firing! As a blogger named "pale" wrote over at A Creative Revolution, "Why would anyone give this woman a platform to spew her venom?"

Why pale, how brilliant! Only you should have a platform to spew your venom.

One reader, aptly named "TheManWithNoPoint" replied to the blog, "I want Rachel Marsden off the columnist role for that rag, or I'm kicking it into high gear. Hint: And that might involve placards and thermoses full of hot cocoa, at a certain newspaper's head office."

This was notihing short of a full blown effort to get a columnist fired that spread like wildfire across the blogosphere.

All my regular readers know I get equally outraged when a liberal voice is silenced by the right. Thankfully that rarely happens.

But exactly what was Marsden's unforgivable sin that led to her firing? Well, she expressed an opinion. It was kind of her job at Sun Media.

She said that, under certain circumstances, in time of war, certain actions, including waterboarding, might be necessary. I've made the exact same case here in my blog, but no one can fire me. Of course, I'm not as funny or sarcastic as Marsden either.

Marsden did go on to defend the practice of waterboarding and make a case that it wasn't even torture.

Now you can disagree with her every premise, you can argue point by point that she is wrong, she is ignorant, she is cruel, she is petty, she is stupid or that she is ugly (although that is a stretch). That is a debate, a discussion, a dialog. But getting her fired? That stifles debate.

No discussion is necessary. The silence of the lambs.

Here are some key points from Marsden in her blog reply to her firing: Some Have Forgotten How War Works

If the West loses the current war against Islamofascism, it will be because some have lost all sense of what war really means.

Last week, in my weekly Sun Media column, I argued that it’s really not that big of a deal to make terror suspects like 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed essentially do what any kid does at Halloween when he bobs for apples--except in the presence of the CIA, and with the prize in the terrorist’s case being lifesaving information.

That column triggered an email campaign spearheaded by the Daily Kos--the largest far-left blog in America--which appealed to the Sun’s new editor-in-chief from the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest leftist newspaper. As a result, after 2 years with the Sun and a hundred columns, my writing is now in search of a new home.

Really, has society lost its collective mind to the point where we’ve forgotten how to properly wage a war?

General Paul Tibbets, who dropped the A-bomb on Japan that ended World War II, recently passed away. According to the New York Times, Tibbets told a PBS documentary: “It would have been morally wrong if we’d have had that weapon and not used it and let a million more people die.”

And now here we are, 60 years later, wringing our hands over how we should treat people who have made it abundantly clear that they would have killed us, if we hadn’t nabbed them first. What’s the alternative that the terrorist sympathizers are looking for? To tickle them until they cry uncle and promise to be good boys?

War isn’t like divvying up the contents of a condo upon divorce so everyone walks away feeling good. It means people have to die. And sometimes even be forced to bob for apples with the CIA. Sorry, but that’s the way it has always worked. In the words of the A-bomb pilot: “I have been convinced that we saved more lives than we took.”