After strolling through the exhibition hall of CPAC 2010 on Thursday, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow told viewers that night of her impressions.
Here's Maddow describing one of the things she didn't like --
MADDOW: There were lots of people giving away copies of the Constitution, but in a thing that sort of bothers me, they couldn't resist adding their own documents to the Constitution. So you can get the Constitution, plus say, the mission statement of the anti-ACLU American Civil Rights Union. Or you can get the Constitution plus the mission statement of the Young America's Foundation. Or you can get the Constitution with a foreword by Ron Paul. Much as I love Ron Paul, I don't think you get to write a foreword to the Constitution.
Actually you do, thanks to -- all together, in unison -- the Constitution.
Here we have a left-winger feigning reverence for a seminal document in American history, at the same time revealing a censorious impulse that runs counter to one of the document's key principles -- freedom of expression.
The organizations and politician mentioned by Maddow aren't amending or altering the Constitution, they are merely supplementing it with their own views.
Can anyone imagine Maddow responding this way if her occasional guests Glenn Greenwald, Ron Suskind or Frank Rich wrote of alleged constitutional misdeeds by Bush and Cheney, followed by a text of the Constitution for reference?
Maddow's gripe is not with the practice of attaching political tracts to one of our nation's founding documents. It's with the politics of the tracts she cited.
Expect no less from a liberal who once insisted the Constitution has no preamble.
