Okay, the Danish cartoons thing

FWIW, and it probably ain't worth that much, here's the most sane thing I've seen yet on the issue. Fittingly, perhaps, it comes not from a Bush administration mouthpiece, or a knee-jerk "First Amendmenter" or from either side of the "blogosphere."

It comes from Doonesbury cartoonist G.B. Trudeau, who knows something about inflammatory cartoons, when asked about it by the San Francisco Chronicle:

Why has the U.S. news media (broadcast and print), almost universally refused to publish the cartoons?

I assume because they believe, correctly, it is unnecessarily inflammatory. It's legal to run them, but is it wise? The Danish editor who started all this actually recruited cartoonists to draw offensive cartoons (some of those he invited declined). And why did he do it? To demonstrate that in a Western liberal society he could. Well, we already knew that. Some victory for freedom of expression. An editor who deliberately sets out to provoke or hurt people because he's worried about "self-censorship" is not an editor I'd care to work for.

And:

Is there an echo?

If you mean a personal echo, not really. I have 600 client editors, and I don't for a moment expect them all on any given day to judge my work suitable for their wildly different audiences. We have editors for a reason. Just because a society has almost unlimited freedom of expression doesn't mean we should ever stop thinking about its consequences in the real world. If The New York Times had commissioned a dozen vicious, anti-Semitic cartoons, would we be having a comparable debate? I don't think so.

More in the link above.