And the apparatchik they tasked with firing it is Senator Dick ‘Droogie’ Durbin, who pondered in public that grand philosophical question: What is media in the age of Totalitarianism?…
What is a journalist today in 2013? We know it’s someone that works for Fox or AP, but does it include a blogger? Does it include someone who is tweeting? Are these people journalists and entitled to constitutional protection? We need to ask 21st century questions about a provision that was written over 200 years ago.
From Jeff Goldstein, we learn:
What we need to remember — and how we should respond — to desperate attempts from this Administration and its Democrat lackeys hoping that the proposal of a “press shield law” will save them from having to speak to the AP phone scandal, is that we already have one of those: the First Amendment, right there at the top of the Bill of Rights. And further, we need to remind these Administration officials and Democrats — and the still sleeping citizenry — that the only reason one could offer for carving out a new and specific niche of “rights” for the press, rights that will presumably voted on and passed by Congress then signed into law by a Marxist imposter playing President, is if those newly-endowed rights exclude the rights of others not in the press, who won’t be covered by said “shield.”
The upshot being that in order to be shielded from government attempts to police speech, you’ll first need to be credentialed in a way in which the government approves.
At which point, “free speech” becomes government condoned speech. And what could possibly go wrong with that?
Senator Dick Durbin admits — openly, and without seemingly any fear of backlash — that he’s not certain who and what should be protected, in this day of Twitter and blogs. People like me, for instance, who have written posts proclaiming proudly and in ALL CAPS that I AM NOT A JOURNALIST are, in Durbin’s view, perhaps not eligible for protection from governmental attempts to regulate their speech under proposed “shield” laws, because they don’t meet the standards of the “press” the government recognizes and (through credentialing) can control.
And how will Durbin and his fellow Fascists accomplish their main goal, which is to silence opposition in Social Media?
Jeff again:
To get around this open and brazen attack on the First Amendment, Durbin hints at the very (historically unsupportable) rhetorical tack leftists have taken with the 2nd Amendment: the Founders, having lived so long ago, were fine with farmers having muskets, but they could have never foreseen the average citizen walking around with “military-style” weapons with bayonet lugs and folding stocks! Similarly here — and though our entire early “press” was a chaotic deluge of biased pamphleteers — Durbin wants to claim that the Founders couldn’t have foreseen media with so huge a reach and so rapid a form of dissemination. Therefore, who or what is protected is a matter for our betters to puzzle over — finding 21st century “solutions” to the problem of not being able to staunch the flow of information that keeps the government awash in scandal.
So…the same tactics we’ve used [so far, successfully] to fight the Left In America’s attempts to take away the natural rights protected by our Second Amendment seem to be called for in this fight to preserve those protected by our First Amendment.
Okay…fine — Battle Stations, Outlaws.
Protein Wisdom commentator Sdferr remarks:
It’s a clever bit of business: government molests the people’s right, then promises to curb itself by carving off unnatural categories for protection, thus accruing ever more power to molest the people’s right. But murder is still wrong.
The creator of the fake problem offers the solution.
Another front in the war opens.
And The Battle Rages On.
