Welcome to episode

of the Charles C.W. Cook podcast. You can probably hear it, but my voice is on its way out.

Hopefully not forever. But this will, I'm afraid, be the first husky-voiced episode of this podcast.

I sent my children off to the petri dish that is their school,

and they came home, and we all got whatever it was that little Timmy in class C came to school with.

So if you're thinking that I sound a little bit different this week,

I in fact do sound a little bit different this week.

But I thought I would soldier on anyway and keep to the schedule.

This was not something we were especially good at with Mad Dogs and Englishmen.

I know the podcast has shifted around a bit, sometimes Monday, sometimes Friday, sometimes Wednesday.

But my plan is to have one every single week.

And so despite the attack of the dreaded lurgy, that's what I'm going to do.

I want to start today's show by talking about something that has been bothering me since last week,

namely the now reflexive tendency of so many in the American press corps to respond to anything that

happens in the world, whatever it is, by insisting that their ideological opponents must decline

to speak. I'm sure all of you by now have heard that a mentally ill drug addict broke into Nancy Pelosi's home in San Francisco and attacked her 82-year-old husband with a hammer.

And I'm sure you've also heard by now that this is apparently the fault of the Republican Party

for having had the temerity to engage in politics in precisely the same way as does the Democratic Party.

Often, and I suspect deliberately so, this game has been played vaguely.

The conclusion has been the same in every case,

and that conclusion has been,

people I don't like must be quiet.

...