Timothy Noah accuses John

Ashcroft of telling a whopper when he said, “No one believes in our

First Amendment civil liberties more than this administration.” What

makes it a whopper? Two things, supposedly: Ari Fleischer’s September 26

remark that people should “watch what they say, watch what they do”; and

Donald Rumsfeld’s recent remark, “We can live with a healthy debate as

long as it is as elevated as possible and as civil as possible.”

Whatever you think of those two remarks–and I don’t regard them as

particularly sinister–how exactly do they amount to evidence of

disbelief in the First Amendment? It’s not as though Rumsfeld was

suggesting that the government would punish debate that wasn’t elevated

or civil.