The turkey was pardoned

The turkey received better treatment:

Our long national Elizabeth Lauten nightmare is over.  She’s out of a job, after tendering the sort of “resignations” that would usually be accompanied by an expressed desire to spend more time with her family.  Don’t you feel better now?

Who’s Elizabeth Lauten, you ask?  You must not have been following the mainstream media over the weekend, because they thought she was a very big deal.  Until now, she was the comms director for Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-TN).  Don’t you dare ask, “Who’s Stephen Fincher?”  I just told you.  It’s right there in between the parentheses.  The “R” is the most significant of the three letters contained therein.

Lauten's sin was to criticize the dress and deportment of the Obama daughters, Sasha and Malia, in a Facebook post. The event Lauten referenced was the now-annual White House turkey pardon, in which a random gobbler survives the ax at the behest of the Leader of the Free World. Lauten was kinda snide and that's a huge deal, so she had to be gone.

I always know when any Republican operative, anywhere, says something that might not be very nice. The lefties on my own Facebook feed share the news instantaneously. The dope in Big Stone County who wanted to frag Muslims? Heard all about it. This lady? Wall-to-wall coverage.

Yet again, John Hayward makes the salient point:

When Jonathan Gruber, the architect of ObamaCare, was caught on tape admitting to the massive fraud necessary to shove the program through Congress, it was scarcely treated as news by Big Media (although Jake Tapper at CNN was a notable exception.)  When President Obama straight-up lied to the American people about his association with Gruber, the media yawned and relayed the lies with little objection or criticism, essentially taking the attitude that it was a non-story because everyone knew Obama was lying out of obvious political necessity.

But a staffer for a Republican member of Congress says something critical of the Royal Family, and look out – it’s an instant four-alarm fire, complete with an Internet flash mob – the laziest form of pressure ever invented – and a head swiftly rolls.  Lauten was gone in a fraction of the time it took to cashier VA Secretary Eric Shinseki after the worst scandal ever, in a messy department where that’s a fairly high bar to clear, despite a far louder outcry from more serious people than the insta-critics that took Lauten down over a Facebook post.  And it wasn’t an inherently outrageous or profane post, either.

All that is true, but there's also a larger point -- back to Hayward:

We’ve also seen sinister flash mobs go after pop-up outrage targets like Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, not because of anything he said or did today, but because of a political donation made years ago.  It’s quick and easy to be part of an outrage swarm.  The cost in terms of time spent is virtually zero, the consequences for unreasonably hounding someone are negligible – unsuccessful outrage swarms end with nothing but a brief sense of mild disappointment, followed by a stampede to the next exciting target – and success makes for briefly entertaining blood sport.

One of the reasons I fear for the political future of free speech is that it’s no longer a cultural value.  When someone gets hounded out of a job for allegedly offensive speech, we’re told it’s nothing to worry about from a First Amendment standpoint, because it wasn’t “censorship,” the government prosecuting someone for exercising their free-speech rights; it was an employer succumbing to public pressure and terminating a business relationship.  True, but the esteem we hold for values such as free speech is reflected in our conduct, and government power reflects that conduct in turn.  The more comfortable people get with dropping heavy consequences upon those who speak out of turn, the more comfortable they’ll become with the government regulation of speech.  If freelance vigilante censorship is vigorous enough, one hardly even needs the unconstitutional government variety.  Free speech can be taken from a society, or it can be thrown away… but either way, it’s gone.

There's a lot of "shut up, they explained" out there these days. While no one seriously argues that free speech should always be consequence-free speech, the consequences for someone like Lauten are ridiculous. It's the reason why I almost never post anything political on Facebook.

For the record, the Obama daughters looked fine. And they looked bored. Can't say that I blame them for that.