[Vision2020] Obama’s Assault on the First Amendment

[No Weatherman]

>From what I can tell, some of the Obama supporters on this list don't
have a problem with squelching criticism of their candidate, as well
as crushing those who offer the criticism. And i'm not alone, one PUMA
site asks, "Are We Becoming an Obama Police State?"

http://texasdarlin.wordpress.com/2008/09/27/is-this-1984-missouri-public-officials-join-obamas-truth-squad/

The answer is, "Yes," and in some cases we already are:

Obama's Assault on the First Amendment
Stifling political debate with threats of prosecution is not the "rule
of law" — it's tyranny.
By Andrew C. McCarthy

In London last week, a frightful warning was sounded about encroaching
tyranny. At an important conference, speaker after impassioned speaker
warned of the peril to Western values posed by freedom-devouring
sharia — the Islamic legal code. Like all tyrannies, sharia's first
target is speech: Suppress all examination of Muslim radicalism by
threats of prosecution and libel actions, and smugly call it "the rule
of law."

But we may already be further gone than the London conferees feared.
And without resort to the Islamicization that so startled them. For
that, we can thank the campaign of Barack Obama.

I'll be blunt: Sen. Obama and his supporters despise free expression,
the bedrock of American self-determinism and hence American democracy.
What's more, like garden-variety despots, they see law not as a means
of ensuring liberty but as a tool to intimidate and quell dissent.

We London conferees were fretting over speech codes, "hate speech"
restrictions, "Islamophobia" provisions, and "libel tourism" — the use
of less journalist-friendly defamation laws in foreign jurisdictions
to eviscerate our First Amendment freedom to report, for example, on
the nexus between ostensible Islamic charity and the funding of
terrorist operations.

All the while, in St. Louis, local law-enforcement authorities,
dominated by Democrat-party activists, were threatening libel
prosecutions against Obama's political opposition. County Circuit
Attorney Bob McCulloch and City Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce,
abetted by a local sheriff and encouraged by the Obama campaign,
warned that members of the public who dared speak out against Obama
during the campaign's crucial final weeks would face criminal libel
charges — if, in the judgment of these conflicted officials, such
criticism of their champion was "false."

The chill wind was bracing. The Taliban could not better rig matters.
The Prophet of Change is only to be admired, not questioned. In the
stretch run of an American election, there is to be no examination of
a candidate for the world's most powerful office — whether about his
radical record, the fringe Leftism that lies beneath his thin,
centrist veneer, his enabling of infanticide, his history of
race-conscious politics, his proposals for unprecedented confiscation
and distribution of private property (including a massive transfer of
American wealth to third-world dictators through international
bureaucrats), his ruinous economic policies that have helped leave
Illinois a financial wreck, his place at the vortex of the credit
market implosion that has put the U.S. economy on the brink of
meltdown, his aggressive push for American withdrawal and defeat in
Iraq, his easy gravitation to America-hating activists, be they
preachers like Jeremiah Wright, terrorists like Bill Ayers, or
Communists like Frank Marshall Davis. Comment on any of this and risk
indictment or, at the very least, government harassment and exorbitant
legal fees.

Nor was this an isolated incident.

Item: When the American Issues Project ran political ads calling
attention to Obama's extensive ties to Ayers, the Weatherman terrorist
who brags about having bombed the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol, the
Obama campaign pressured the Justice Department to launch an absurd
criminal prosecution.

Item: When commentator Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy
Center was invited on a Chicago radio program to discuss his
investigation of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, an "education
reform" project in which Obama and Ayers (just "a guy who lives in my
neighborhood") collaborated to dole out over $100 million, the Obama
campaign issued an Internet action alert. Supporters, armed with the
campaign's non-responsive talking points, dutifully flooded the
program with calls and emails, protesting Kurtz's appearance and
attempting to shout him down.

Item: Both Obama and his running mate, Sen. Joe Biden, have indicated
that an Obama administration would use its control of the Justice
Department to prosecute its political opponents, including Bush
administration officials responsible for the national security
policies put in effect after nearly 3000 Americans were killed in the
9/11 attacks.

Item: There is a troubling report that the Justice Department's Civil
Rights Section, top officials of which are Obama contributors, has
suggested criminal prosecutions against those they anticipate will
engage in voter "intimidation" or "oppression" in an election
involving a black candidate. (Memo to my former DOJ colleagues: In a
system that presumes innocence even after crimes have undeniably been
committed, responsible prosecutors don't assume non-suspects will
commit future law violations — especially when doing so necessarily
undermines the First Amendment freedoms those prosecutors solemnly
swear to uphold.)

Obama may very well win the November election but he, like Sen.
McCain, should be forced to win it fair and square: by persuading
Americans that he is the superior candidate after our free society has
had its customary free and open debate.

One understandably feels little sympathy for McCain here. His
years-long assault on the First Amendment under the guise of
campaign-finance "reform" has led inexorably to the brazenness of
Obama's Chicago-style strong-arming. But the victim here is not
McCain. The victim is democratic self-determination. The victim is our
right to informed participation in a political community's most
important decisions. The victim is freedom.

The Justice Department's job is to prosecute those actively
undermining our freedom, not to intimidate citizens in the exercise of
that freedom. Consequently, instead of threatening criminal
investigations of phantom future civil-rights violations, it should be
conducting criminal investigations into whether public officials in
St. Louis are abusing their offices to affect a national election.

The federal Hatch Act (codified in Title 5 of the U.S. Code) prohibits
executive officials (such as prosecutors and police) from using their
offices to interfere with federal elections. The statute may be of
limited utility in St. Louis since it principally targets federal
officials. Still, state and local government may come within its ambit
if their activities are funded in part by the national Leviathan — as
many arms of municipal government are these days.

The same bright-line demarcation does not limit application of the
federal extortion and fraud laws. The extortion provision (also known
as the Hobbs Act and codified at Section 1951 of the federal penal
code) makes it a felony for anyone, including public officials, to
deprive people of their property by inducing fear of harm. Property
interests have been held to include, for example, the right of union
members to participate in a democratic process; the harm apprehended
can be either physical or economic. Inducing voters to fear
prosecution and imprisonment unless they refrain from exercising their
fundamental right to engage democratic debate may well qualify.

An easier fit may be fraud, which under federal law (Section 1346 of
the penal code) prohibits schemes to deprive citizens of their
"intangible right of honest services" from their public officials.
Prosecutors and police who abuse their enormous powers in order to
promote the election of their preferred candidates violate their
public trust.

Regardless of the legal landscape, however, it is the political
consequences that matter. Day after day, Obama demonstrates that the
"change" he represents is a severing of our body politic from the
moorings that make us America. If we idly stand by while he and his
thugs kill free political debate, we die too.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=M2MxMWJlNzcwMDU3ZTJkYjRmZjU3N2U0OGNlZmE1ZDg=