In Russia, it's a crime to publish or broadcast messages that "offend" the president. Venezuela recently enacted a similar law. These laws are designed to stifle dissent by encouraging self-censorship.
So it's instructive that presidential candidate Barack Obama's legal counsel is calling for the prosecution of the senator's critics - even though the criticism is protected speech under federal law.
This is an alarming development. Obama campaign counsel Bob Bauer has demanded that the Justice Department "investigate" and "prosecute" a group that is running an ad describing Obama's ties to Bill Ayers, a former '60s terrorist bomber, and to do the same to the donor who funded the message. (Click here for a copy of the letter.)
The campaign aggressively pressured TV stations not to air the ad - a form of censorship that cries out for immediate denunciation and apology from Obama.
All in the course of campaign rhetoric? Just good political warfare to stomp out unwelcome messages? Perhaps. But the fact that a presidential campaign wants to criminalize free speech - especially when the message appears to be entirely true - gives us a clue of a disturbing mindset in the Obama campaign. Unless Senator Obama personally and publicly renounces the calls for prosecution and denounces and fires Bauer, we are to assume that criminalization of criticism will be a standard operating procedure in an Obama administration.
(Montage courtesy of the People's Cube.)
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