Anybody remember the First Amendment?

James Kirchick pulls the curtain on the "no politicizing" wizard. Excerpt:

Rather than engage its critics, the White House adopted a holier-than-thou approach to the controversy. "The President doesn't think we should play politics with issues like these," spokesman Bill Burton told reporters.

That's strange, for the supposed gravity of an issue hasn't stopped liberals from "playing politics" with other matters they deem to be of life and death importance - or from "playing politics," repeatedly, with national security in the past.

The truth is, politicization of an issue ought not be an accusation at all. It's by politicizing issues, no matter what they are, no matter which party does it, that we debate them. And it's through debating them that we engage in the democratic process.

But that reality hasn't stopped Democrats from hurling around the term like a grenade.

He then goes on to remind liberals blasts on the megaphone like Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 and hysterical howls about Halliburton. His conclusion:

Determining which issue isn't kosher for "politicization," then, becomes a form of special pleading. We all have our sacred cows, and it suits us to declare certain topics off-limits. But in a country where the powers of the state derive from those it governs, it's inevitable that practically everything under the sun will emerge as a subject of political debate. Rather than bemoan this, we ought appreciate just how lucky we are to live in a democracy where we have the luxury to complain about the amplification of politics, as opposed to their suppression.

I think Kirchick is right about this. It may be noble to let politics "stop at the water's edge", but it doesn't represent good debate strategy. Of course, squelching ideas is much more a tactic of the left as we can see from the President's pompous rhetoric about "tired old arguments" an the like. The speech protected by the First Amendment is first and foremost political speech and it should be always welcomed by Americans. If you disagree with it, use your own free speech rights to combat it. Trying to get your opponent disqualified is not American.