For much of the last decade, Frank Rich has insisted that among the scariest moments in the post-9/11 world, if not ever, was Ari Fleischer saying, off the cuff right after 9/11 and in response to some really idiotic statements, that people might want to “watch what they say.”

For Rich — and countless liberal peers — this was an affront to free speech, decency, and all we hold dear. Now, I bring it up because for the last ten months, and in earnest in the last two, Barack Obama has in high-minded ways and in low ways, directly and indirectly, told his opponents they should shut up. “I don’t want to hear any talk . . .” etc. Now his White House is openly and with premeditation attacking news outlets. Fleischer quickly explained what he meant, and his explanation was perfectly reasonable and his initial statement perfectly defensible. But people like Rich never let him or the Bush White House off the hook. Now comes the Obama White House which has admitted its strategy of de-legitimizing its opponents and the Rich crowd is either silent or outright cheering.

Anyway, for those interested, here are a few excerpts from Rich over the years. You decide if his sanctimony is based in first principles and a sincere love for free speech, or mere partisan hackery.

NYT: Sept. 10, 2006:

This selfish agenda was there from the very start. As we now know from many firsthand accounts, a cadre from Mr. Bush’s war cabinet was already busily hyping nonexistent links between Iraq and the Qaeda attacks. The presidential press secretary, Ari Fleischer, condemned Bill Maher’s irreverent comic response to 9/11 by reminding ”all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do.” Fear itself — the fear that ”paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance,” as F.D.R. had it — was already being wielded as a weapon against Americans by their own government.

NYT March 13, 2005:

I’m not a particular enthusiast for dirty jokes, but that freedom is exactly what I, and I suspect others, felt when a comic with a funny voice in a bad suit broke all the rules of propriety at that Friars Roast. But it was just three days earlier at the White House that Ari Fleischer, asked to respond to a politically incorrect remark about 9/11 by another comedian, Bill Maher, warned all Americans ”to watch what they say.” That last week in September 2001, I’ve come to realize, is as much a marker in our cultural history as two weeks earlier is a marker in the history of our relations with the world. Even as we’re constantly told we’re in a war for ”freedom” abroad, freedom in our culture at home has been under attack ever since.

NYT Oct. 17, 2004

The path of the Bush White House as it has moved from Agnew-style press baiting to outright assault has also followed its antecedent. The Nixon administration’s first legal attack on the press, a year before the Watergate break-in, was its attempt to stop The Times and The Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers, the leaked internal Defense Department history of our failure in Vietnam. Though 9/11 prompted Ari Fleischer’s first effort to warn the media to ”watch what they say,” it’s failure in Iraq that has pushed the Bush administration over the edge.

NYT March 21, 2004

Not all of this can be pinned on Ms. Jackson’s nipple ring. This story dates back to 9/11, or, more specifically, to two weeks after, when the White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, condemned a historically astute Bill Maher wisecrack about America’s ”cowardly” pre-9/11 pursuit of Al Qaeda. Mr. Fleischer warned Americans that they should ”watch what they say,” and some Americans took heed. Mr. Maher’s ”Politically Incorrect” was dropped by a few network affiliates and advertisers and then canceled by ABC.
The message had been sent that governmental media management was in play, and we’ve seen its ramifications ever since — whether in the docility and self-censorship of the news media in the run-up to the Iraq war or in an episode as relatively trivial as CBS’s dropping of ”The Reagans.” While the current uproar over broadcast indecency is ostensibly all about sex, it is still all about politics, especially in an election year when a culture war rages. Washington’s latest crew of Puritan enforcers — in the administration, Congress and the Federal Communications Commission — are all pandering to a censorious Republican political base that is the closest thing America has to its own Taliban. The media giants, fearful of losing the deregulatory financial favors the federal government can bestow, will knuckle under accordingly until the coast is clear.