Alan Keyes, Fascist

So “black Republican” (if there’s anything sillier than that oxymoron, I have yet to hear it) Alan Keyes is running for Senate. I suppose it’s a fine thing that the GOP found someone to run against Obama, but if they wanted to go the black against black route they might have chosen someone who isn’t a died-in-the-wool fascist. Keyes, who ran for president in 1992 and 1996, already is suffering from one of those mass emails going around the Internet containing embarrassing quotes, but one important one is missing.

Because Alan Keyes didn’t like one of my cartoons in 2002, during the height of the Bushite Two Year Hate Against the Left that followed 9/11, he actually suggested that I be shot, imprisoned or subjected to government censorship:

Should such a cartoonist be punished, arrested? Shot at dawn? Or does any such suggestion violate principles which are themselves crucial to the cause we fight to defend?

To answer these questions, we must first of all retain our confidence in certain moral judgments, in our capacity to make certain basic distinctions. Serious debate about the war and its purpose is crucial, and freedom to conduct this debate, in Congress and elsewhere, must be non-negotiable in all but the most genuinely extreme circumstances.

But this brutal and inhuman comic strip was not debate – it was an assault on the decent national sensibilities crucial to the war effort. Such assaults are a kind of pornography in civic discourse. And like our response to pornographers, our toleration of Mr. Rall, and our means for dealing with him, are matters for prudential consideration.

A free people should normally suppress such activities through private moral judgment and association. Pornographers should be shunned by all, and likewise Mr. Ted Rall should have been fired immediately by those with professional authority over him, or in contractual relations with him. Such action in defense of the decent judgment of this people in regard to 9-11 would be more than sufficient to keep such as Mr. Rall from subverting our national resolve.

But it is worth remembering that when serious and sustained attempts to undermine public opinion on a matter genuinely essential to national life cannot be resisted by other means, governmental action may be necessary.

If Keyes belongs in the Senate, Hitler belongs in the White House.