posted August 07, 2011 04:58 PM            

John Kerry, Censor-in-Chief?
August 6, 2011
Louis Riggs

Senator John Kerry, former presidential nominee, appears to be gunning for a new job--United States Censor in Chief. Target 1: mentioning the Tea Party
Senator John Kerry (D-Massachusetts), the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, appears to be gunning for a new job--Censor in Chief. Senator Kerry has publicly declared that the media should henceforth and forthwith refrain from giving "equal time...equal reportage" to the Tea Party.

Kerry's rationale: they're just plain wrong and it's wrong to 'give equal time/balance to "absurd notions" just because someone says it.' Taken to its logical extreme, about half of Hollywood would immediately be subject to a news blackout and C-Span's coverage of live Congressional action would be terminated.

Kerry appears to be a constitutional strict re-constructionist. While the First Amendment spells out that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press, it doesn't require that a member of Congress refrain from calling on members of the press to stifle debate, either. Never mind that a significant segment of the news media has consistently featured unfavorable reportage about the Tea Party from the beginning of the movement more than two years ago--one major online article from a news provider dated August 5, 2011 is entitled "Is the U.S. Credit Rating a Victim of GOP Sabotage?" and includes disparaging comments about Tea Party-supported Congressional freshmen. It's not enough for Senator Kerry to have the blame for the first downgrade of the U.S. credit rating since 1917 laid squarely on the Republican doorstep; no mention should be made of these "absurd" people at all.

Harry Truman told us that 'the only thing new under the sun is the history that you don't already know.'

Here's a little historical tidbit that Senator Kerry might not be aware of. Unce upon a time in a land not so far away, (the USSR after Joseph Stalin died), the overlord of the KGB, Lavrenty Beria, fell from grace, fell from power, and fell off the face of the earth. The winners in this power struggle sought to finish the job by banishing Beria from the public consciousness itself by literally declaring him a 'non-person' and rewriting existing history itself. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, which had prominently featured Beria, was 'supplemented' with more information about the Bering Sea, the next entry in the encyclopedia, so as to literally paper over any mention of Beria himself.

Yet here we are, more than 55 years later, and Beria's name is still being bandied about, despite the best efforts of accomplished despots to obliterate it from the face of the earth.

If we're fortunate, Senator Kerry's lecture concerning the duty of journalists to stop giving "equal time" to the Tea Party types will survive for the next 55 years as a testament to the short-sightedness of those who would seek to limit discourse by creating their own echo chambers and then passing them off as reasonable responses to circumstances beyond their control. The Tea Party genie is out of the bottle, like it or not, and it isn't going quietly back from whence it came.

Senator Kerry's angst is understandable--after all, the Tea Party folks in Massachusetts had the gall to send a Republican to Washington to fill Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in January 2010. Worse, despite the best efforts of his Congressional colleagues, the Tea Party folks are still angry--and are still flexing their political muscle.

However sincere his pain, however, censorsing mention of the Tea Party and its ideas will not lead to the intended result. The Tea Party is not only not going away; if recent polls regarding the disgust people feel regarding members of Congress are accurate, the movement might actually be picking up steam.

As for Kerry himself, the last time I looked, there was no "Censorship Czar" present within the Washington firmament. For the moment, it appears that he will have to stick with the portfolio of the self-appointed office of Media Scold.
http://www.suite101.com/content/john-kerry-censor-in-chief-a383310