Legitimate Dissent or Anti-American?

I was watching the O'Reilly Factor last night and I thought Bill brought up an interesting point. He was discussing the difference between expressing legitimate dissent against a country or government and spouting anti (in this case American) comments or accusations.


He showed clips of musician Bruce Springsteen performing a concert on the Today show. Before he performed, he said


"This is a song called 'Livin' In the Future.' But it's really about what's happening now. Right now. It's kind of about how the things we love about America, cheeseburgers, French fries, the Yankees battlin' Boston, the Bill of Rights, v-twin motorcycles, Tim Russert's haircut, trans-fats and the Jersey Shore... We love those things the way womenfolk love on Matt Lauer.

But over the past six years we've had to add to the American picture: rendition, illegal wiretapping, voter suppression, no habeus corpus, the neglect of that great city New Orleans and its people, an attack on the Constitution. And the loss of our best men and women in a tragic war.

This is a song about things that shouldn't happen here happening here. So right now we plan to do something about it, we plan to sing about it. I know it's early (in the morning), but it's late. So come and join us."

O'Reilly said that Springsteen's comments could be described as legitimate dissent as long as he could provide facts and examples to support such things as "no habeus corpus" and "an attack on the Constitution."

I think this makes sense. We have first amendments rights as citizens of this country, and if we want to express dissent, we should be able to do so.

O'Reilly also showed a clip of Sean Penn on the Late Show with David Letterman. A portion of their conversation reads

SEAN PENN: Well, I think if people have oil under their ground they're called wacky. I found him a very fascinating guy. Very, you know, he's done, for the moment, incredible things for the 80 percent of the people that are very poor there. But a fascinating character, somebody I'm writing about.

LETTERMAN: But isn't he talking about nationalizing the media? That always makes me a little concerned when somebody's talking about doing that.

PENN: He's, well, you know, one of the things that's been said about him is he's shut down a television station. What happened is that since 1998 they had been encouraging the assassination of Chavez every day on that channel -- something that they would have gone to prison for here. And so he just didn't re-up that license. But meanwhile, you know, the idea that, that there's no freedom of expression, I mean the loons on Fox News are broadcast there every day.

O'Reilly had a different take on Penn's comments. Penn was defending Hugo Chavez's choice to shut down a television station. However, the information he provided regarding why he shut it down was false. O'Reilly uncovered that the station he shut down was not the one that was encouraging his assassination, but a separate one entirely. Therefore he categorized his comments as anti-American.

The facts behind Penn's comments were untrue, and therefore, classified as anti-American by O'Reilly.

I found these classifications interesting because of the controversy over the house editorial in the Collegian and my studies in my law class of the 1st amendment. It seems like Hollywood sure knows how to exercise their right of freedom of speech.

Here are the links for articles related to the Hollywood comments:

Bruce Springsteen

Sean Penn