That said, I’m about to admit to something surprising. Eight years ago, I voted for Bush. Yeah, yeah, I know, stop screaming… Lemme explain… See, out of all the inalienable rights I hold true and dear, the ones I believe are the most important are those guaranteed by the First Amendment. Freedom of Speech. Freedom of the Press. Freedom of Assembly. Freedom of Religion. (Bet ya thought you’d never see me capitalize THAT word!) And no matter how much I knew Darth Bush and Emperor Cheney getting elected would fuck up this country on a financial level, I could not bring myself to vote for Al Gore, champion of censorship in music, and especially Joe Lieberman, champion of censorship in EVERYTHING (most notably video games and film). Nobody could have expected something like 9/11/2001 to give the reds free reign to throw out any rights they didn’t see the need for. (Ya know, the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, Fifth Amendment, Sixth Amendment, Eighth Amendment…)
That said, here’s what frightens me now. Since John McPain (who I wouldn’t have minded 8 years ago, but like the Dems the past two years, he has spent two Bush terms being a spineless follower, NOT the “maverick” his campaign wants us to think of him as) announced his VP candidate last week, we’ve seen plenty of stories about her political record (and about how little a record it is) in Alaska. Out of it all, one very frightening detail jumps out at me. To quote Time Magazine:
Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. “She asked the library how she could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. “The librarian was aghast.” That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn’t be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving “full support” to the mayor.
If I wasn’t already decided on the Dems this election, this would seal the deal! CENSORSHIP AND BANNING BOOKS IS THE CALLING CARD OF FASCISM! We can NOT allow this Republican party to maintain any control over the government. It is time for the people to take back the rights the founding fathers deemed so incontrovertible that they had to add them to the Constitution as Amendments, they so believed the rights to be self-evident that they originally did not believe they needed to be written out.