The story goes that Bernard Shaw once asked a woman he didn’t like whether she would go to bed with him for a million pounds. She said, “Yes.”

Then he said, “I’ll give you ten shillings to go to bed with me.”

She is supposed to have answered, “What do you think I am?”

He replied, “We’ve established what you are. Now we’re discussing price.”

I was thinking about that as I watched Bill O’Reilly interviewing Ann Coulter last night. The subject was that she was going to speak on a campus and of course “activists” rioted and made that impossible. Meanwhile her speech in Canada was canceled by Canadians because a professor warned her she would go to prison in that country for saying the wrong thing.

There was a problem because O’Reilly is in the position of arguing price. Like most respectable non-leftists, he is more anxious to lead the lynch mob against anyone liberals choose to call racists than liberals are. In any case, with the O’Reillys and National Review around, they don’t need to.

Ann Coulter frustrated O’Reilly because he kept trying to give her a chance to prove she wasn’t a racist. She kept holding to the line that she should be able to say whatever she wished. O’Reilly finally sighed and said, “Well, I kept giving you the chance and you wouldn’t take it.”

As I understand it, his frustration was that he kept giving her a chance to deny any offensive remarks and she kept emphasizing that Thought Crime Laws were IN THEMSELVES bad. She is also the only mainline writer I know of who has criticized HOLY DIVERSITY ITSELF.

The only national writer I ever saw who praised European Thought Crimes laws was William Buckley. Hannity has said that anyone who opposed interracial marriage, as very one of the Founder Fathers did, was a Nazi.

Mr. Shaw, our prostitutes are on the professional right.

Ann Coulter made the point in passing that no one speaks on a campus without a body guard. O’Reilly didn’t comment on that. He certainly wouldn’t. If you say something liberals see as racist or Hate, O’Reilly likes to insist he would be one of the threatening crowd.

Back when ALL public officials opposed interracial marriage, if you knocked on the door of the Presidential Mansion, the White House, there was an excellent chance that the President would answer the door. But then again, presidents, even Reconstruction Republicans ones, all opposed intermarriage and not one single Reconstruction Government ever repealed the anti-miscegenation law in any state, so O’Reilly and Hannity would have forced the president to guard himself.

They SAY. But for a couple of squashy-assed respectable conservatives to scare Old Hickory seems unlikely. When Jackson died, someone asked his black butler if he went to heaven or hell. The man answered, “If Mr. Jackson wanted to go to heaven, nobody could have stood in his way.”

I doubt seriously if a modern body guard would be dumb enough to try to crack one of those old nuts.

But that was before the Obedient Generation. Nobody since the 1930s has said, “People won’t stand for that.”

About ANYTHING.

That is why it is so absurd for people to say that “The Constitution protects our rights.” Before World War II, WE protected our rights. Germany wrote its Weimar Constitution and Stalin wrote the most democratic constitution ever composed in 1936. The Nazis rightly insisted everything they did was under the old Weimar Constitution, and they were right.

The Weimar Constitution had an emergency section which allowed the government to do anything if it followed proper procedures. The Nazis governed under those emergency provisions and, given the huge Communist vote and the Depression, there was an emergency.

Stalin simply gave his wildly free constitution — it even allowed for the secessions we saw around 1990 — a Marxist INTERPRETATION.

The National Recovery Act passed by FDR in 1933 gave FDR price controls, profit controls, and, in fact, a socialist economic regime. The Supreme Court, appointed by Coolidge and Hoover, declared NRA unconstitutional.

Had the Court done that in 1933 when Roosevelt’s honeymoon period was on full blast, he could have gotten his Court Packing Scheme through and controlled the Court. But he didn’t try that until the 1938 election, when for the first time his electoral magic of 1932, 1934, and 1936 had died down, so he failed.

But, like Prohibition, the National Recovery Act failed because it was tried on the wrong generation. The Obedient Generation would have bitched and obeyed Prohibition, as they itched and obeyed after their dog-training, called Basic. With the NRA, it would have been enough show their manhood by bitching, because They Had Proven Their Courage in the War.

Sarge TOLD them so. So did Walter Cronkite.