Babydoll –
It’s kind of funny that you would be referring to “liberties” and “legal mumbo jumbo” as if they were necessarily opposed. =-) Anyway, you don’t have it quite right. The Constitution itself is there to limit what the government can do to you – that is how it ensures your “liberties.” It is not there to protect you from your fellow citizens – that is the job of state and local laws, and really doesn’t have anything in particular to do with being American.
As for defamation, it is a tort, not a crime. In other words, it is something for which you can sue someone for damages, much the same way as you can sue someone for violating a contract. However, it’s not criminal, and the law leaves it to a private person to enforce his own rights in that arena via a lawsuit for defamation. Now, you’ll note that as the plaintiff, the burden of proof is on the supposedly defamed person to demonstrate the falseness of the statement. As you said, it does have to be false – maliciously, demonstrably false. That is step one. Then, you have to have actual damage to reputation that can be quantified into a dollar figure for a verdict.
That is overly simplistic, but that’s it in a nutshell with regard to a private person. However, celebrities are not private people, and criticism of them falls under the rubric of protected speech under the First Amendment. One does not have as much free rein to defame a celebrity as to defame a politician, but one has much more free rein to defame a celebrity than to defame a private citizen who has not put himself into the public limelight. Again, this is a very simplistic summary of First Amendment law with respect to defamation, but there you go.
Now, as to your assertion that boycotts are somehow unAmerican, I beg to differ. To apply your statement broadly, you would mean that it is unAmerican for me to boycott David Duke and try to get him blacklisted – or, really, any old KKK Grand Wizard. Would you disagree with “blacklisting” a university professor who continually professed his beliefs that women were completely inferior to men in every way?The protections of the law that allow for people to express their preferences by voting with their pocket books or banding together with like-minded individuals to privately achieve a goal apply both to causes you like and causes with which you disagree. I’m sure you don’t consider it unAmerican to boycott fur producers, nuclear powerplants or whatnot – the same applies to those on the other side of the political fence.
And now that I’m done defending the right to boycott Michael Moore, I’ll once again say I don’t agree with it in practice. Moore is a buffoon, but the cure for “bad” speech, meaning flawed ideas, is more speech. It’s more debate, more ideas, more argument, more discussion. It’s the marketplace of ideas – let the the people hear all the arguments and make their own decisions.
And, I guess I’ll end with this thought, which is only a slight digression – for all the way that “McCarthyism” is thrown around as this horrible, scary word, McCarthyism didn’t account for the deaths of hundreds of millions of people, which, if you aggregate Lenin, Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot, not to mention Castro, Ho Chi Minh and various other little tin-pot dictators, Communism most surely did. Communism accounted for far more horrible executions than did Fascism of Nazism. Remember Babydoll, as you said above, “Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it,” – empahsis on the “doomed.”