RichardHarlos.com

It seems nearly every day now my head spins with incredulousness over the things that go on here in America, and that so few Americans seem to care anything about. Case in point: the suggestion that the American government create an Office of Censorship to monitor and pre-approve which news may be printed and which ought to be censored:

On the June 29 broadcast of Fox News Radio’s Brian & The Judge, co-host Brian Kilmeade, who also co-hosts Fox News’ Fox & Friends, suggested that the U.S. government should “put up the Office of Censorship,” in the wake of reports in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal detailing a Treasury Department program designed to monitor international financial transactions for terrorist activity. Similarly, during the June 29 edition of Fox & Friends, co-host E.D. Hill wondered if it would be appropriate for the U.S. government to create an “Office of Censorship.”

-from Fox & Friends co-host Kilmeade advocated “Office of Censorship” in wake of NY Times banking surveillance story, MediaMatters.org, 29 June 2006.

There’s a rationale being offered that such an office would be in America’s best interest and that there wouldn’t be any long-term consequences for giving up such freedoms because the Office of Censorship could be created with a “sunset clause” to limit it’s duration.

I thought to myself, “Yeah, a ’sunset clause’ just like The PATRIOT Act’s sunset clause that, when it expired, was renewed with a permanence that makes most intelligent and thoughtful citizens cringe with regret.”

In school I learned that America was born out of a people’s desire to escape the oppression of a tyrant and the government infrastructure that supported such a ruler. I naively thought that every American learned the same thing, and additionally that these freedoms that were Constitutionally established, were precious and not to be lightly surrendered.

Apparently I was mistaken about what every American learned in school. Or perhaps I was correct, but my error was that every American would care about such things… would earnestly attend to the preservation of such freedoms… would rather fight and, if need be, die, in the effort to protect what so many died in the past to make ours today, than to surrender these hard-earned liberties to the the pursuit of relatively insignificant indulgences.

America had an Office of Censorship once before, which you can learn about at PRWatch.org and CIA.gov and Wikipedia.org and USHMM.org.

(hat-tip to Maurice Reeves for first bringing this story to my attention)