BLANKLEY: Yes, we need censorship

[arcadian]

Hey Tony, you fuck, Islamic fascists? Really? What about the Wall Street fascists who have drunkenly driven us off a cliff? Who's gonna save us from them? Go crawl back under your rock, you sniveling piece of trash. I think the Reverand Moon is calling you Tony, he wants you to kiss his ring.


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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/feb/12/yes-we-need-censorship/

Thursday, February 12, 2009

BLANKLEY: Yes, we need censorship

During wartime, there is a natural tension between civil liberties and national security. Security must take precedence. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration rolled back very few civil liberties. Aside from establishing a regime for handling captured foreign terrorists, the curtailments largely consisted of common-sense enhancements in the power of intelligence agencies to monitor terrorism suspects and access their personal records. And the administration did so, in a limited way, because it rightly deemed these restrictions in America's national security interests. Bush's steps were modest, yet liberal journalists reacted as if he were the reincarnation of Stalin, or, more to their taste, Hitler.

Some observers reject outright the necessity of enhanced government powers. Denying that we are currently in a time of national peril, some argue that Islamist fascism does not present an existential threat to America. In a December 2008 draft report, a bipartisan, congressionally mandated commission found there was a better-than-even chance that terrorists would attack a major international city with weapons of mass destruction in the next few years. The threat of some kind of nuclear device being detonated in America is greater now than it was during the Cold War, when the doctrine of mutually assured destruction ensured that no nuclear weapons were used in what we used to call the balance of terror.

Faced with this imminent threat, to insist on the continuation of all the civil liberties we enjoyed during the 1990s is to handcuff the government in its war fighting efforts, making another terror attack more likely. My argument is simply this: a temporary reduction of personal and media freedoms is an acceptable price to pay in order to lessen the chance that Islamic fanatics will commit further atrocities against the American people.

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