Fixin' America

Constitutional Law

The Health Care Bills and The First Amendment

by Michael Connelly

Posted October 13, 2009

The unprecedented response of Americans to the attempts by the Obama administration and the Democratic leadership in Congress to establish the takeover of health care in our nation by the federal government has been gratifying to say the least. However, it has also revealed the fact that in order to counter the opposition of ordinary Americans this administration is preparing to take extraordinary measures to eliminate our rights under the First Amendment to the Constitution.

This effort is going far beyond the use of the mainstream media to categorize those who oppose anything President Obama does as racists or the result of some vast right-wing conspiracy. The plan is to eliminate the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, and the right to petition our own government for redress of grievances. Of course, the far left has been trying for years to stifle free speech with its politically correct movement that has taken hold in college campuses, public schools, and even businesses.

The concept is not new. It was successfully practiced by the Nazi Party in Germany and the Communist revolutionists in Russia, China, and Cuba. The idea is to demonize the opposition and to shut them down by establishing complete control over the news media, and any other methods of free communication of thought. Of course, the vast majority of Americans believe that this type of control can never happen in our country. Unfortunately, it is already happening and there are efforts in the works to make it happen faster.

While Americans of every political persuasion try to voice their concerns at town hall meetings, members of Congress run for cover by cancelling events or limiting entry only to those who will agree with their positions. The President himself conducts town hall meetings that are so carefully orchestrated that questions and answers are prepared beforehand. The voices of dissent at many of these meetings are locked out and even assaulted by a squad of carefully selected goons from the SEIU, a so-called labor union that is becoming more and more like the brown shirts of Nazi Party every day.

When Hitler or any of his Nazi Party cohorts were speaking at public functions the platform they used was surrounded by brown shirts to "protect them". Their actual job was to station themselves both outside and inside of the place where the function was being held. They denied entry to those that might not be true believers and if anyone did make it inside they were quickly and violently removed if they failed to follow the party line. Doesn't that sound familiar?

In addition, the Nazis and Communists also successfully turned people against each other by encouraging neighbors to report on neighbors, students to snitch on teachers, and even children to turn in their parents if they strayed from the party line by word or deed. The electronic age has made it much easier for this type of thing. The White House simply set up an e-mail link so people could report anyone who said anything that the left considered "fishy" about the health care bills.

When you have a black man beaten up outside a town hall meeting in St. Louis because he dared to hand out "Don't Tread on Me" flags and an elderly white cancer patient forcibly removed when he tried to enter one of these meetings in Florida it certainly looks like the same tactics employed by dictatorships around the world. Of course, the so-called mainstream news media do their part for the Obama Administration by ignoring these incidents. However, if they can't ignore it, they will just falsely report information in an attempt to turn it to the advantage of their own political agenda.

With massive "tea parties" being held around the country to protest the tax and spend policies of the Democrats in Congress the major networks have found them impossible to ignore so they use "attack journalism" to report them. Virtually nothing is reported about who attends the rallies or what they are saying. Instead they are reported as Republican staged rallies attended only by members of right wing fringe groups. In addition, they are certainly not going to accurately report that tens of thousands of Americans are attending these demonstrations. Instead, they will follow the policy of one newspaper that reported that less than 300 people attended a rally in Columbus, Ohio that police estimated was actually attended by over 10,000 people.

However, the most blatant lie perpetrated recently was done by MSNBC which is not at all surprising since NBC news has established itself as the official network of the Obama Administration. I personally saw the handwriting on the wall when NBC News Anchor Brian Wilson bowed before President Obama after concluding a self serving propaganda presentation that clearly set this President and his polices above the rest of us peons. This bow was something no journalist in the history of the United States has ever done before a President of our Republic.

MSNBC decided to go one step further. When the President was speaking in Phoenix, Arizona to the VFW there were numerous people outside of the building exercising their right of free speech. One of these was a gentleman who exercised his right to openly carry an AR-15 rifle and a pistol on his belt in order to support his 2nd Amendment rights. This is legal in Arizona and reporters for MSNBC went ballistic, showing close-up film of the weapons and reporting how serious this was that there was a black man in the White House and that whites were showing up at his speech with weapons. There was one major problem with this report however. Others had captured the same images of the protestor and had not edited out his face and arms. See, the problem for MSNBC is that the protestor was a black man.

The NBC news networks are not alone in this. Other major media outlets such as CNN, ABC, CBS, and the New York Times are also practicing the Dr. Joseph Goebbels School of Journalism. Goebbels was Hitler's Minister of Propaganda and he had two main functions. The first was to provide unadulterated praise for anything the Fuehrer and his fellow party members were doing and secondly to silence or at least stifle any dissenting voices. This also sounds chillingly familiar.

Of course, dissenting opinions are alive and well and they are a real irritant to the Obama Administration and its supporters in Congress. Thus, they are taking aggressive steps to deal with this opposition. Their first target is talk radio that primarily consists of conservative commentators. This dominance has not come about by any conspiracy, but by the forces of a free market. Liberal talk radio shows have consistently failed to attract the audiences that people like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity do so they don't attract advertisers. The liberal talk shows literally die from lack of interest.

This is unacceptable to the far left so legislation was introduced by Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) to reinstate the so-called Fairness Doctrine under another name and provide for balanced broadcasting of liberal and conservative talk radio shows. This would force broadcasters to essential provide left wing programming for free and would force many stations to either go bankrupt or to cancel all talk radio programs. Either way, the mission would be accomplished; the American people would not be able to have free access to viewpoints that dissent from the "official" party line.

When the public realized what was about to happen an outcry arose that kept the legislation from passing so President Obama decided to ignore both Congress and the American people and make one of his famous end-runs by appointing a "Diversity Czar" to force the FCC to do the administration's bidding when it comes to conservative programs and views. The Czar is Mark Lloyd, a far left activist who has openly praised Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez for his silencing of the free press in Venezuela. In fact, Lloyd has made it clear that he has little use for the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. He has stated:

"It should be clear by now that my focus…is not freedom of speech or the press. This freedom is all too often an exaggeration. At the very least, blind references to freedom of speech or the press serve as a distraction of from the critical examination of other communications policies"

I don't think James Madison considered the First Amendment "a distraction" and I doubt that the vast majority of the American people believe that is the case. Yet, the President of the United States apparently has that opinion, or at least one of his appointees does.

Of course, talk radio is not the only target of the far left members of Congress and the Obama Administration. They are also deeply concerned about the use of the Internet to get out the messages that are ignored by the liberals in the media. For example, the tea parties were primarily the result of people spreading the word online and the left wants this stopped.

As a result, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.) has introduced legislation that would transfer even more power from the people and the Congress to the Executive Branch of Government. The legislation is supposedly designed to promote cybersecurity, but it has little to do with protecting government sites such as those in the Pentagon from cyber attacks by our enemies. Instead, it targets the private use of the Internet by millions of Americans every day.

There are two key provisions of the bill and both of them contain direct assaults on freedom of speech and the press. First, the law would allow President Obama to seize control of privately operated Internet networks during a Cyber Emergency. What is a Cyber Emergency? There is no definition of it in the legislation so it is essentially anything the President decides. He can shut down massive portions of the Internet at any time for any reason.

Secondly, the bill also allows the Executive Branch to control the internet by requiring that certain operators of networks that are deemed 'critical" by the government must be operated by "professionals" licensed by the government. The definitions of the terms "critical" and "professionals" are again left entirely to the Obama administration. I am not an Internet expert, and may be just a retired Constitutional Lawyer and former Military Intelligence Officer, but I'm pretty sure I just saw this same form of Internet control exercised in Iran when protests broke out after a clearly fraudulent election. Of course, that could never happen here; or could it?

What would happen to our efforts to petition our government for "a redress of our grievances" if we were denied the means to communicate with each other?