On Friday the little messiah's campaign dropped this turd into the nation's political punchbowl. Jim Geraghty writes on NRO's The Campaign Spot:
Missouri Prosecutors, Sheriffs 'Target Anyone Who Lies' About Barack Obama
A St. Louis television station reports — their words — "The Barack Obama campaign is asking Missouri law enforcement to target anyone who lies or runs a misleading TV ad during the presidential campaign."
Prosecutors and sheriffs from across Missouri are joining "The Barack Obama Truth Squad."
They mention Jennifer Joyce, St. Louis Circuit Attorney and Bob McCullough, prosecutor for St. Louis County in Missouri.
The reporter says, "They will be reminding voters that Barack Obama is a Christian who wants to cut taxes for anyone making less than $250,000 a year."
While the report never quite comes out and says that anyone running an ad saying those things would be subject to prosecution, that certainly is the message implied.
Not all things that are wrong are illegal. Saying that Barack Obama is a Muslim is wrong, but it does not warrant prosecution by the state.
I would cite Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, but an angry mob just took my copy to their book-burning...
UPDATE: AIP responds:
Washington, DC – September 26, 2008 – Barack Obama is now using local law enforcement officials to carry out his campaign of legal intimidation by assembling a group of high-ranking Missouri police officials and prosecutors – including St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCullough and City of St. Louis Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce – to identify and target anyone the campaign determines is producing “misleading” political advertisements.
“This is an outrageous and shocking attempt by the Obama campaign to again employ Stalinist, police state tactics against those who dare to disagree with Barack Obama,” said Ed Martin, American Issues Projects president. “I am frankly stunned to see public officials like McCullough and Joyce abusing their official prosecutorial positions to serve as attack dogs for a national political campaign. I am quite certain Missourians elected these individuals to enforce the laws and arrest criminals, not to throw people in jail for daring to practicing free speech.
"The Obama campaign continues to provide a chilling preview of what would happen to political freedom in an Obama administration.”
This new effort is only the most recent attempt by the Obama campaign to crack down on free speech. Obama’s lawyers twice demanded the Department of Justice investigate and prosecute the American Issues Project, its officers, board of directors, and donors. The campaign also threatened stations running American Issues Project’s ad in an unsuccessful attempt to compel them to pull the spot, and ran its own ad in response.
Notably, this ad failed to dispute a single fact the American Issues Project has put forth.
The Governor of Missouri had this to say in response:
Gov. Blunt Statement on Obama Campaign’s Abusive Use of Missouri Law Enforcement
JEFFERSON CITY - Gov. Matt Blunt today issued the following statement on news reports that have exposed plans by U.S. Senator Barack Obama to use Missouri law enforcement to threaten and intimidate his critics.
“St. Louis County Circuit Attorney Bob McCulloch, St. Louis City Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce, Jefferson County Sheriff Glenn Boyer, and Obama and the leader of his Missouri campaign Senator Claire McCaskill have attached the stench of police state tactics to the Obama-Biden campaign.
“What Senator Obama and his helpers are doing is scandalous beyond words, the party that claims to be the party of Thomas Jefferson is abusing the justice system and offices of public trust to silence political criticism with threats of prosecution and criminal punishment.
“This abuse of the law for intimidation insults the most sacred principles and ideals of Jefferson. I can think of nothing more offensive to Jefferson’s thinking than using the power of the state to deprive Americans of their civil rights. The only conceivable purpose of Messrs. McCulloch, Obama and the others is to frighten people away from expressing themselves, to chill free and open debate, to suppress support and donations to conservative organizations targeted by this anti-civil rights, to strangle criticism of Mr. Obama, to suppress ads about his support of higher taxes, and to choke out criticism on television, radio, the Internet, blogs, e-mail and daily conversation about the election.
“Barack Obama needs to grow up. Leftist blogs and others in the press constantly say false things about me and my family. Usually, we ignore false and scurrilous accusations because the purveyors have no credibility. When necessary, we refute them. Enlisting Missouri law enforcement to intimidate people and kill free debate is reminiscent of the Sedition Acts - not a free society.”
It's not that the little messiah, or the manchild as Rush calls him, needs to "grow up". He already is "grown up". It's just that he grew up in the sewer of Chicago street politics where the almost unbelievable corruption of the Cook County Democrat machine meets the handout oriented racially charged grievance culture created by the welfare state.
Barack Obama's political identity was formed by reading and closely following the book Rules for Radicals which was written by the hard-core Stalinist Saul Alinsky and by the mentoring of the America hating racist and Black Liberation Theology spouting "pastor" Jeremiah Wright and by his years-long friendship and close association with unrepentant terrorist bomber and communist revolutionary William Ayers.
Given that background how can we expect Obama to be anything other than the kind of man who would seek to enlist the power of the nation's legal establishment to intimidate his opponents into silence?
The left in this country has made a cottage industry of comparing Bush to Hitler. However nothing that Mr. Bush has ever done or sought the congressional authority to do (which really only amounts to giving the nations law enforcement and intelligence agencies the ability to listen in on the phone calls of people who have a proven connection to foreign terrorists) comes within light years of what the "Obama Truth Squad" is setting out to do.
At the Republican convention we saw Obama's partisans dressed alike in black "uniforms" plotting acts of violence against the delegates up to and including kidnapping and attempted murder (throwing bags of cement off freeway overpasses onto the buses carrying delegates to the convention is attempted murder).
This is EXACTLY the kind of behavior that Hitler's Sturmabteilung (SA, Brownshirts, Storm Troopers) engaged in during the time when the NSDAP (Nazi party) was competing in German elections.
After gaining power Hitler bent the law enforcement agencies of the German state to his will. Under the leadership of men like Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann the law enforcement agencies of Germany became the servants of the Nazi party and its leader Adolf Hitler.
In the police state environment created by Hitler in Germany, Stalin in the Soviet Union and Mussolini in Italy to simply disagree with and express a contary opinion to the ruling party and its Leader carried serious consequences, up to and including a concentration camp or a bullet through the back of the head.
Now in America we have a major party's nominee for the office of president attempting to use similar police state tactics before he has even been elected. If he will do this when he is just a candidate what will he do if he actually has the power of the executive branch in his hands?
I urge my fellow citizens to think long and hard about this question before they head into the voting booth.
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