Heed the Call
Between the 4th of July festivities -- the parades and the fireworks, the BBQs and the pool, is an article that should be required reading for all. Brent Budowsky has a column in the Editor & Publisher, A July 4th Call to Arms -- To Protect the 4th Estate, that personifies the day we are celebrating. This is a theme that I have returned to many times -- and is in fact the concept underlying my blog -- that we can't have justice or peace without truth. And a free press is vital to provide truth -- without which, we are not a democracy. This piece eloquently expresses these views, which are so important that it is difficult to merely excerpt portions. Budowsky reminds:
As America celebrates July 4, honoring Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine and Founding Fathers who committed treason against tyranny, and defeated an empire of Kings with the power of freedom and truth, we are reminded again of the preeminent importance of the First Amendment to a nation governed of the informed consent of a democratic people.* * * *
Freedom of the press was created as a Fourth Estate, a primary check and balance to a free nation who's governance is carefully balanced between the executive, legislative and judicial branches, designed to limit each other's power to protect the common good of America.
When Thomas Paine wrote that the sun never shined on a cause as great as ours, that cause was not the monarchy of King George where those who knocked on doors at night could write their own search warrants. It is no coincidence that after freedom had triumphed in the new world, Paine and others took the cause to France and continental Europe, followed generations later by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the triumph of Paine's successors over not only the Soviet Politburo's crimes but their agents of lies from Pravda to Radio Moscow.* * * *
We have a President who claims the inherent, presumptive power to abrogate provisions of the Constitution and throw aside the Bill of Rights, a monarchical power he literally asserts with a doctrine championed by our current Attorney General.
Those who do not agree, are charged with treason, and threatened with prison. We have a President who claims more than 700 times that he can break the very laws he signs, and those who challenge this are called traitors, and threatened with retribution. We have an attorney general who believes the Geneva Convention, championed by virtually all in the military who our president falsely claims he always heeds, is some quant relic of the past, and those who reveal the truth of abuses are called unpatriotic, enemies of the state, and threatened with investigation.* * * *
It is time to man the barricades of democracy in defense of all three branches of government and the Fourth Estate, in the defense of the two hundred year old notion that we are indeed in this together, that we share a democracy of
fellow patriots where the voices that charge treason are not the voices of true Americanism, and that Thomas Paine's greatest sun that ever shined on earth is now ours to preserve, protect and defend in a nation of fellow patriots on a common mission, based on courageous search for truth defended by courageous heroism in war.
God Bless America. Happy 4th of July.
See also, Frank Rich's timely NYTimes column, Can't Win the War? Bomb the Press!
----
What is under attack, with the recent partisan charges of "treason" directed at the press, is not some abstract notion of "the public's right to know" but the core of the American system of government. It's time to "man the barricades of democracy."
Tags:
No comments:
Post a Comment