Fox News is real or somebody didn’t read the “Velveteen Rabbit”

First, let me say that I am not now, nor will I ever be, a fan of Fox News. The list of reasons is fairly long, but the big one was my annoyance with the fact that their site used to regularly cause my browser to crash. That said, it’s fair to say that my opinion on them is not necessarily something that anyone needs to debate with me about.

However, I am a very big fan of the First Amendment. I think I was forced to read the Constitution from beginning to end sometime in my grammar school years – between 4th and 6th grades. From the beginning, I understood that it was a “cool” thing that we had the right to speak out (something that we couldn’t do in our Catholic School classrooms.) Needless to say, I had some very strict teachers, and one thing I definitely remember is that they drilled it into our heads from the very beginning that freedom of speech also meant that we had to defend that same right even for people we didn’t agree with.

When I read Jake Tapper’s exchange with Press Secretary Gibbs today, I was more than a little annoyed. The knee jerk response was, “Who the hell do they think they are?!?!” Granted, that was probably magnified by the fact that I’d been debating Obama’s acceptance of the U.N.’s resolution on free speech elsewhere, but still.

I don’t care how silly, out of bounds, or anything else that Fox News is or becomes. The White House has no business stating outright or otherwise that it is not a news organization. It is not in the job description, and bluntly, those who did it may as well go to Constitution Center and defecate on the Constitution itself!