Recently a few distressed voices in the wilderness have been raised in alarm at the newest, darkest, and most dangerous threat to America's success in the war on terror: the media. Morton Kondracke recently pointed out that the media 'is in danger of talking the United States into defeat in Iraq. And the results would be catastrophic.' He goes on to pin the West's Iraq problems squarely where they belong: on the media's fixation with the Abu Ghraib scandal. How astute, Mr Kondracke! For it was in fact the press's obsession with military torture that allowed the the Shiite and Sunni insurgencies to claim whole cities from the American occupation.
But what to do about this pernicious enemy within? Analytical wunderkind and concerned lover of law Glenn Reynolds muses, 'Freedom of the press, as it exists today (and didn't exist, really, until the 1960s) is unlikely to survive if a majority -- or even a large and angry minority -- of Americans comes to conclude that the press is untrustworthy and unpatriotic.' Quite true, Professor Reynolds. And America will likely need that angry minority if we're to inforce patriotism on our press, and end the nightmarish salvo of information and journalism that threatens to cripple the war effort. For this is not merely a war for freedom. Indeed, it is also a war against freedom - specifically, that freedom which seeks to destroy freedom.
These concepts may be too complex and nuanced for the unsophisticated or Democrats to fully grasp, but the Medium Lobster will endeavor to explain. A free-loving society must protect not only its freedoms, but the society which enables those freedoms to be protected, for if that society was to be destroyed, then all freedoms would disappear. In order for freedom to persist, we must outlaw the freedom to destroy or damage society. Thus, freedom cries out for us to destroy those freedoms which would destroy freedom, such as murder, genocide, violent revolution, sedition, criticism of good wars, publication of disheartening news regarding those wars, criticism of the Commander In Chief during wartime, the teaching of seditious literature, obscenity ...
I can't complain about the great job the Bush regime is doing boosting the readership for satirists. Satire had been in decline for some time.
Good complement to The Onion's article on winning by terror (see posting of a week ago or so).
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