I'm just kicking myself. Why didn't I release my video of me having sex with Paris Hilton before everyone else did? Damn it!
I am simply amazed. Today the Supreme Court upheld provisions in the McCain-Feingold limiting free speech. Yep, folks, your federal government is now telling you what you can say and when you can say it. And people think this is a conservative court? I also have to blame President Bush for signing this monstrosity. The popular thought was that the president could get some approval for wanting to reform the system, but that surely the Supremes would strike this down as unconstitutional. I mean this is the First Amendment after all. Well think again. Some people like to debate the meaning of the words of the Second Amendment, but the First Amendment can be no clearer. Let's go over it again, shall we? "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." It gets no simpler than that. We have had debates as to what speech is. Personal expression has evolved into speech. Stripping is speech. Wearing clothing is speech. But a political ad sixty days prior to a federal election apparently is not. Political speech is what the First Amendment meant as speech to begin with! There is a sinister element to this. The press is obviously exempt from this. (Strange that that provision should stand.) So what is going to happen (I won't say "could happen" because I believe this will actually happen) is that inside of sixty days the Democrat-sympathetic news media will release a "news" story about President Bush. Perhaps the Democrat candidate will make some ridiculous allegation, something possibly erroneous or at the very least questionable in interpretation. It will get picked up by every news organization in the nation and every voter will be aware of it. The Bush campaign will have no recourse to run an ad campaign to refute the story. They can certainly answer the charge in the media, but they will not give it the same weight as the allegation. (They never have before, why start now?) And since people really start to pay attention to elections within a few months of Election Day, they will be aware of the situation and opinions will be changed. Perhaps just enough to turn a close election. Part of the majority opinion was that the limitations on free speech was necessary to root out corruption or the appearance of such. What?!? With all the other corruption in D.C., how is a political ad corrupting? I figured that the part of the law that could have stuck (and did) would have been regarding the contributions and whether they are speech or not. That can be debated. I personally don't agree with this decision either. Contributions to a candidate was deemed a form of speech by an earlier Court ruling but that has now changed. But a political ad is speech. Actual speech. Real honest to God making sounds with the mouth and forming words speech. This decision has essentially nullified part of the Bill of Rights. I've never been a black helicopter big brother government is out to get me kind of guy, but things are starting to turn in the country. We are the frogs and the heat under the frying pan just got turned up a notch. Are we ever going to jump out? Ribbet. Ouch! Ribbet! Ooh, that's hot! Ribbet.
And another thing...
Did you notice that big demonstration in Baghdad against terrorism? See much of it on CNN or the network newscasts? Read about it in the USA Today? No? Gee I wonder why. Maybe because it doesn't fit in with the picture they are trying to present to you of the post-war effort. There really can be no other explanation. Every single attack against our troops is treated as if it were the Massacre at Little Big Horn. (And each loss of life is important, but would we ever have had the intestinal fortitude to fight WWII if we had our current media capabilities? I think not.) We are constantly shown coverage of anti-American protests around the world by communist organizations (although we are never told who they really are) and whining leftist activist splinter groups and we are told that the whole world opposes us. Yet good things are happening every day. Polls routinely show that while Iraqis expect us to leave after establishing normalcy, a large majority don't want us to cut out just yet. But here's how that story would be spun by the good folks at your most trusted news organizations: "Iraqis Want Americans Out Of Iraq". Or how about this one. They might not be all that happy with the way that every little thing is going, but they know it's a lot better than Saddam Hussein. Push that through the new spin machine and you get a headline "Iraqis Unhappy With U.S. Occupation". If you have never read Bernard Goldberg's Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News, run out to your local bookstore and buy it now. I need to pick up his most recent book on the subject, Arrogance: Rescuing America From the Media Elite. Much to the chagrin of his former colleagues, he shines the light on blatant bias in the media. But instead of intentional slanting of the news for propagandist purposes (like I believe the above mentioned slight was), most of the bias in the media seems to be a result of ignorance. Ignorance of a world view that is different than their own. I'm sure that most of the members of the media who voted for Al Gore in the 2000 election cannot possibly figure out why he didn't win in a landslide. I mean, doesn't everyone else think like they do? Well, no. He did win the popular vote and he could have won the electoral vote if not for the stupid people in those pesky fly-over states. They take assumptions and prejudices and accept them as fact. Republicans are mean and Democrats are nice. Northeastern liberals are enlightened and Middle American conservatives are close-minded. Those are a given. Once that foundation is established, every news item is framed in that context. They simply cannot help it. It's the only world they know. Unfortunately it's not the real world. I think that is why the media elites think that conservative talk radio, the alternate media on the internet and best-selling books by non-liberal writers are some sort of plot on the part of the Republican Party. They cannot possibly understand that people don't trust them to tell them the unfiltered truth and that they have to go elsewhere to hear and read the other side of the story. Or in the case of positive news in Iraq to get the story at all.