2 ms·
That's not true, except in a reductio ad adsurdum sense. Presidents administer laws, hire and fire staff, spend money, withhold money, declare wars, veto laws,
by jsdalton 18y ago
That's not true, except in a reductio ad adsurdum sense. Presidents administer laws, hire and fire staff, spend money, withhold money, declare wars, veto laws, etc. In the absurdly literal sense they do execute these actions by exercising their vocal chords to speak and triggering their fingers to write, but this is totally different from being a journalist writer and speaker.
It is also true that not all speech is equally tolerable, in both the moral and legal sense. The Supreme Court ruled long ago, for example, that yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater is not an instance of protected speech.
- yters 18y agoSo how is that different from saying "Arrington just speaks at conferences and writes blog posts. Why do people hate him?"
- jsdalton 18y agoSpeaking and writing as a journalist is what Michael Arrington does. That's a very specific type of speech -- so specific in fact that it's actually explicitly protected by the U.S. Constitution. There is simply no relationship whatsoever between an article Michael writes and, for example, a President's order to bomb another country, except that the two are in some way shape or form molded out of words.