When I was a boy in school we stood and recited the Pledge of Allegiance everyday. We prayed the Lord's Prayer. Our fathers were still being celebrated as the heroes who saved Europe from Hitler's flame. Our reading materials included a little newspaper called "The Weekly Reader."
America was locked in a very cold war with the Soviet Union. We read about the horrid conditions "behind the iron curtain" where people were gathering in small groups to listen to "Radio Free Europe" a Congressional sanctioned broadcast providing news an information to countries where the free flow of information was banned.
We were told that children in those countries were being encouraged to turn in their parents if they knew of such small groups listening to these broadcasts. We were told that people in those nations lived in fear of their government. The world in which I grew up included images of families being rounded up and never heard from again. The entire notion of free speech had been erased from their world. My mind was imprinted very early to fight against anything that resembled the slightest restriction on freedom.
I'd like to encourage you to read an article written by Tim Carney for the Washington Examiner. Hear these words:
Benghazi. The IRS targeting the Tea Party. Feds snooping on the Associated Press. These dizzying controversies around the Obama administration all carry the same lesson:
Watch what you say.
On Benghazi, set aside for a moment the dust-ups over State Department officials changing talking points, White House officials misleading the media, and congressional Republicans misrepresenting administration emails. Go back to what the administration was saying just after the deadly Sept. 11, 2012, attacks on the U.S. diplomatic facility.
Many administration officials -- although they may have known better -- blamed the attack, and thus the death of four Americans, on a bad YouTube video called "The Innocence of the Muslims."
Protests outside the U.S. Embassy in Egypt did use the video as a pretext, and White House spokesman Jay Carney responded by calling the video "reprehensible and disgusting." Obama publicly attacked the filmmaker as "sort of a shadowy character who made an extremely offensive video. ..."
Later that month, federal officials arrested this "shadowy character" for probation violations related to making the video.
From the administration falsely blaming the video for Benghazi, to the White House's repeated denunciations, to the federal arrest, the message is clear: Watch what you say.
On the IRS debacle, the speech being policed isn't even offensive -- unless you find it abhorrent to criticize big government or President Obama.
The queries the IRS rained on Tea Party groups in 2010 were aimed at discerning just how political these groups were. What books will your book clubs be discussing? Tell us about your donors -- will any of them run for office?
While targeting Tea Party groups was clearly inappropriate, some of the IRS' questions were actually in keeping with federal law, which restricts 501(c)(4) groups' freedom to oppose candidates for office. This is problematic in itself because it puts the IRS in the business of telling Americans, "Watch what you say about politicians."
Finally, the administration secretly tracked the phone calls of the Associated Press to root out who leaked the report of a drone strike. Then the CIA told AP to hold off on the story so that Obama could announce it first.
This has a chilling affect on journalists. But it's also the latest salvo in the Obama administration's war on whistleblowers. Liberal writer Jane Mayer wrote in 2011 that Obama has used "the Espionage Act to press criminal charges in five alleged instances of national-security leaks -- more such prosecutions than have occurred in all previous administrations combined."
The three scandals of the past two weeks differ in their severity and in the White House's level of culpability. But they all have the same message: "My fellow Americans, watch what you say."
I'll let the elected officials battle it out over how to control health care costs for a Government apparently committed to being the nanny for everyone. I'll let the electoral process decide whether the best way to cure deficit spending is to cut taxes or raise them. I trust the outcome of elections to the extent that bad results can be fixed in two or four years. But when it comes to chilling my rights, and your rights to speak freely, think freely, share freely, assemble freely and to plot and plan legitimate ways to bring about the kind of changes we and those who agree with us would like to see in America, I will never entrust that battle to anybody else.
I am a lawyer. I have taken an oath to defend the Constitution. I take that vow very, very seriously. And I have never shied away from a fight in defense of free speech.
Tim Carney is right. Obama has shown more clearly in the past few weeks than in the past four year combined that his vision for America resembles much of what I was taught to hate about the Soviet Union.
It now appears very clear that he is determined to lower something which resembles an iron curtain over America, engender fear among people, put an end to small groups of freedom loving people who gather in the name of Liberty and to squelch free speech in all quarters.
For those of you who still remember the lessons of your youth, this time in our history should send a chill up your spine. The kind of chill that makes you stand up and fight.
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