Some of the nations that have been criticized by the West for their own draconian crackdowns on inconvenient freedoms of speech have watched Britain's recent struggles with barely disguised glee.
Given the First Amendment and its inconvenient protection of political speech, laws against "negative" ads are out of the question.
In November, at a conference sponsored by the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi, Kenya, Dr. Edward Rege, the organization's biotechnology director, gave a speech listing several "inconvenient facts" about conventional wisdom in the field, adding that conservation approaches can effectively amount to "saying that farmers should remain poor".
Mr. Gore's Oscar acceptance speech for An Inconvenient Truth instead claimed that climate change is a "moral issue".
For those who claim that Donald Trump has been pasteurized and homogenized by the presidency, his sour, 100th-day speech in Harrisburg, Pa., was inconvenient.
But despite the administration's stated wish to roll back inconvenient parts of the First Amendment, freedom of speech is very much alive and well in the US especially in comparison to countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
"Step by step, we will clean our entire border," the Turkish president said in a speech at the end of January, overlooking the inconvenient fact that American forces are active in northern Syria, as allies of the S.D.F.
"We are facing a planetary emergency, one that faces all human civilization," said Mr. Gore, who through speeches, and his widely distributed film "An Inconvenient Truth," has devoted his post-electoral career to raising awareness of climate change.
Both Mr Obama and Mr McCain gave speeches worthy of a turning point.It was a turning point without any inconvenient drama.
If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them".
