Government-funded film critics do grotesque damage to freedom of speech.
Mark Steyn
National Review Online
9/22/2012
I see the Obama campaign has redesigned the American flag, and very attractive it is too. Replacing the 50 stars of a federal republic is the single “O” logo symbolizing the great gaping maw of spendaholic centralization. And where the stripes used to be are a handful of red daubs, eerily mimicking the bloody finger streaks left on the pillars of the U.S. consulate in Benghazi as its staff were dragged out by a mob of savages to be tortured and killed. What better symbol could one have of American foreign policy? Who says the slick hollow vapid marketing of the Obama campaign doesn’t occasionally intersect with reality?
On the latter point, after a week and a half of peddling an utterly false narrative of what happened in Libya, the United States government is apparently beginning to discern that there are limits to what even Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Susan Rice can say with a straight face. The official line — that the slaughter of American officials was some sort of improvised movie review that got a little out of hand — is now in the process of modification to something bearing a less patently absurd relationship to what actually happened. That should not make any more forgivable the grotesque damage that the administration has done to the bedrock principle of civilized society: freedom of speech…
…Obama and Clinton’s two-on-the-aisle act cost $70,000 of taxpayers’ money. That may not sound much in the $16 trillion–dollar sinkhole of Washington, but it’s a pretty big ad buy in Islamabad, and an improper use of public monies. If government functionaries want to do movie reviews, they should have a PBS fundraiser, offering a “Barack & Hill at the Movies” logo-ed burqa for pledges of over $100, and a complimentary clitoridectomy for pledges over $500. I fought a long battle for freedom of expression north of the border when the Canadian Islamic Congress attempted to criminalize my writing, and I’m proud to say I played a modest role in getting Parliament to strike down a shameful law and restore a semblance of free speech to a country that should never have lost it. So I know a little about how the Western world is shuffling into a psychological bondage of its own making, and it’s no small thing when the First Amendment gets swallowed up by the vacuum of American foreign policy…
Read the entire article at National Review Online.
Update: Radical headbanger Qatanani: “We, as Americans, have to put limits on freedom of speech…”
…Chris Christie quite recently called Qatanani his “friend.” Will he explain to his friend about the importance of the freedom of speech now?…
Also, The Taking of American Freedoms
Recent events, both at home and abroad, show the growing trend of misinformation, intimidation, violence and coercion utilized by those determined to force their will upon the majority of Americans while stripping them of their most basic freedoms under the constitution. These tactics are being embraced by our current President and his campaign to obtain his re-election. They are, in fact, tactics the President himself learned from Big Labor’s Gasping Dinosaurs, and which he has, ironically, condoned when he sits back and votes “present” as Americans at home and abroad are persecuted and attacked by those who cannot survive in a free market society without the use of force. These tactics have been chronicled in The Devil at Our Doorstep : The Taking of American Freedoms…
