Gee, that's swell! But here in America we have this irksome little thing called the 1st Amendment. What is it you're advocating exactly, roving death squads for all of us "lefties" who pine for a limited government in line with the vision of the founding fathers? Concentration camps for those of us who don't think the US should try to re-create the world in its own image?
I sleep at night thinking that the powers that be are actually promoting leftist journalism because they don't want the population urging them to overthrow the corrupt Saudi Family and their billions going partly into the pockets of all the politicians in the west.
You might want to keep your windows closed while you do all this entranced analysis. Maybe that idea came from your neighbour's dog (a la Berkowitz) or was beamed into your head via satellite. (Per Occam's razor, I'll just assume that L.S.D. is legal in Russia.)
When I say that I "sleep at night" thinking this...it means that the powers that be *could* stop the leftists if they only wanted to...
For a "conservative," you sure are fond of the good ol' "powers that be" surpressing free speech. Maybe a future Patriot Act, a Mega-Uff-Da-Deluxe Patriot Act will circumscribe that stuffy 1st Amendment for you. Why not start a preamble during your late-night musings, What Is To Be Done sounds catchy!
"For a "conservative," you sure are fond of the good ol' "powers that be" surpressing free speech"
There is a difference between a "First Amendment Right" and actively supporting the enemy in a time of war. Everyone knows that, in Vietnam and Iraq, the purpose of the enemy is to kill a few American soldiers and wait for American traitors to cry "we need to give up" which would cause a few thousand more uneducated female Americans to join the "liberal defeatist" cause, which would have made the killing of American soldiers worthwhile from the terrorist (and liberal) point of view, so it happens again and again and again.
To stop the cycle of terrorism (which includes the killing of US soldiers inside the now post-war Iraq), you have to have an atmosphere where each killing of US soldiers causes the US public to get angrier and to notch up the possibility of taking the war to Syria and Iran, not notch it down. If Syrian and Iranian terror leaders (government ministers) believe that the killing of Americans inside Iraq will cause Americans to *lose interest* in regime change in Syria and Iran...then there will be as much killing of Americans as possible. If these leaders felt the opposite, then Americans would be treated with respect and protected by the insurgents. This is obvious.
In fact, it is so obvious that I assume that the Bush Administration sees an advantage in letting left wing journalists work with the terrorists to turn the minds of the weakest Bush supporters (females with no college education), so the pressure to do something about Saudi Arabia is reduced.
If the leftists were really strategically dangerous to us, there would be a few disappearances and "accidents" befalling the most influential American traitors as happened often before 1969 in this country. As a child, I had a sense that RFK's death wasn't the end of democracy...but rather a correction for RFK's desire to let China continue in its aggression and take the other half of the world.
One has to wonder if Americans are taking seriously the fact that the American media is encouraging the killings of our troops in Iraq.
Look at the London bombings. They resulted in a net loss for the terrorists because of all the "free speech rights" the Muslim "imams" lost in Great Britain as a result. Why should the killings of civilians in the Tube have provoked more outrage than the killing of British soldiers while they were innocently helping with the rebuilding of a post-war democracy? Every dead US soldier should make the public more angry at Syria and Iran's leaders. If this were the case and journalists were able to measure it, the insurgency would stop cold.
But the Bush Administration, like the Johnson and Nixon administrations, feels the need to allow the true enemies to cross the border into our hot zone and kill our troops. I have never been able to fully understand why this is done. Except to reduce public pressure for taking the war to the real enemy. But how does this translate into real support for the troops in Iraq?
The other theory is the flypaper theory that you allow the true enemy to send fighters into the American zone so they can be killed off in large numbers. If, for instance, we have agents in Iran sending fighters by the busload into the waiting arms of our Special Forces...we would want Iran to continue to be our "enemy" for a long while, so we could drain them of their best and dumbest anti-American fighters.
Either way, we still have a proxy war going on now with a clueless left wing media pretending (again!) that we are being fought and beaten by local insurgents. Is it free speech for journalists to lie so baldly? Yes. But what is it when the conservative leadership continuously fails to call them on it? What is it when the conservative leadership might be setting things up so the majority of Americans end up believing the lie that we "lost" the Iraq War (after we gave Shiites control of the Middle East) like we supposedly lost the Vietnam War (after Nixon turned China)? Is it free speech if the left wing is actually being used a tool by the Bush Administration to help Sunni Arabs "save face" as they lose this war, like the Chinese were allowed to "save face" by the Americans "losing" the Vietnam War? Basically, is it really free speech if the conservative owners of the media hire only idiots to be their "journalists" and advise those idiots to pursue their foolish dreams of anti-Americanism in their reports?
In terms of the MSM, there is no such thing as free speech. We read and hear what the few media owners WANT us to hear, and if these owners WANT us to hear a bunch of pacifist whiners slowly eat at our will...then one has to ask: Who are these people who control the MSM and how would the Bush Administration benefit from the "slow the war down" mentality the MSM perpetuates?