South Africa: Everything old is new again?

Wasn't government censorship of the press one of the things that was WRONG with the Old South Africa? Isn't that what the ANC used to claim? Are they now saying censorship is OK, as long as they are the one's doing it?

SAfrica's ANC party wants tribunal for journalists

JOHANNESBURG – South Africa's governing party said Tuesday that the country needs a special tribunal to regulate the work of journalists, a proposal that has drawn sharp criticism from local and international media organizations.

The tribunal would be given powers to rule on media content and to impose unspecified penalties on journalists.

African National Congress spokesman Jackson Mthembu said the party has found numerous instances of news stories that were intentionally damaging to subjects' reputations and dignity.

"Your freedom does not supersede the other freedoms that are there," Jackson told journalists Tuesday. "We say there must be punishment when journalists mess up with reputations and dignity of members of the society."

South African journalists have launched a campaign to fight what they say is an attempt to curtail media freedoms in a nation known for one of Africa's freest and most open constitutions.

Other legislation under consideration would allow South Africa's government to classify a broad range of material that is currently not secret. Under the new law, it would be illegal to leak or to publish information deemed classified by the government, and the offense would be punishable by imprisonment.

On Tuesday, the South African National Editors Forum (SANEF) said it will do what ever it can to stop the proposed "Protection of Information Bill" and media tribunal.

"We are not opposing the ANC government but the bill and tribunal," said Guy David, secretary general of SANEF.

When the old, white ruled government of South Africa censored the South African press, outrage was expressed worldwide, and boycotts and sanctions were imposed on the country.

Now, years later, we have a black ruled government, proposing similar or even worse censorship of the press. Where is the outrage, the world-wide indignation? Will we even hear a peep out of the international press about this?

I wouldn't hold my breath waiting.
     

The Republican culture war continues: Carrie Prejean's sex tape V.S. Meghan McCain's boobs

Carrie Prejean Sextape Video: Meghan McCain "Unnerved" by "Hypocrisy"

NEW YORK (CBS) Meghan McCain, the daughter of 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain, has taken to task fallen beauty queen Carrie Prejean and opponents of same-sex marriage, in the wake of news that the former Miss California USA has filmed a sex tape.

Meghan McCain, who calls herself both a Republican and a strong supporter of same-sex marriage, said that she is "unnerved" by the hypocrisy shown by Prejean, the 22-year-old "anti-gay marriage champion," and politicians who use gay-marriage as a moral "trump card in any situation" while sex scandals, normally abhorrent to conservative moral codes, don't seem to bother them a bit.

"Making a sex tape is never acceptable," McCain wrote in an editorial posted on the news website The Daily Beast . "I find it even more disturbing that as long as you oppose gay marriage, filming yourself having sex is taken more lightly."

"Does anyone else see the hypocrisy in this kind of thinking? And hypocrisy is something the Republican Party can’t afford to have right now as the GOP struggles to find its identity," McCain wrote in the piece posted Monday.

[...]

McCain, who was in a photo flap herself recently for "tweeting" a busty picture of herself to her followers on Twitter, wrote "If you’re a Republican, is it better to be in favor of gay marriage or to make a sex tape?"

"It seems that as long as you are against gay marriage, any scandal in your life can be overlooked or overcome. When you are in favor of it, however—and I have been very vocal about my support—that position defines you," said McCain.

"Many believe that it was Carrie Prejean’s anti-gay marriage views that cost her the Miss USA California title earlier this year. My question is: When it comes to Republicans, is your position on gay marriage what determines your fate within the party?" [...]

All the more reason not to make social issues the spearhead of the Republican Party platform. With George W. we had eight years of social conservatism at the forefront of the party, at the expense of fiscal conservatism, and look where it's gotten us.

I don't say abandon social issues. I say, put at the forefront of the party, as the spearhead, issues like fiscal conservatism, economic growth and job creation, issues that a majority of voters can agree on. The culture wars should occur primarily in the culture, not the GOP.

Not all Republicans agree on the definition of conservative. Not all Republicans are social conservatives. We need to emphasis in our party the things we do agree on: balanced budgets, a strong defense, free markets, and hopefully, individual sovereignty and the freedom to make our own choices.

Under such a platform, social issues would benefit indirectly, because INDIVIDUALS would have the freedom to make their own choices, and be free to fight the culture wars. If we instead fight each other and succumb to a politically correct socialist nanny state, you can kiss it ALL goodbye. 2010 is the last call. The GOP needs to get their Big Tent set up, and quickly.

Follow the link above for photos (Prejean, Meghan's boobs)


Also see:

The GOP: a Political Vehicle, or an Ideology?
 
   

The Keating Five, Obama and John Glenn

From Nealz Nuze: WEAK

[...] Charles Keating was not KNOWN to be a corrupt businessman when his relationship with McCain began. Bill Ayers WAS known to be a terrorist when his relationship with Obama began. If you buddy up with someone who later turns out to be a crook, that's one thing. If you begin an association with someone known to already be a crook – in this case a terrorist – that's quite another. Come on, folks. This stuff is so easy. [...]

(bold emphasis mine) Is the distinction so hard to make? Besides, McCain was acquitted of any wrong doing, so where is the scandal? And if being one of the Keating Five is so scandalous, why does Obama have one of them, John Glenn, helping him on his campaign? Someone should ask him:

Keating Five Member is Obama Surrogate

If Barack Obama is so outraged at John McCain’s involvement in the Keating Five scandal, why is John Glenn, another Keating Five member, doing surrogate work for Obama? [...]

Glenn, like McCain, was found not guilty of violating any Senate rules. Obama has no problem with Glenn, but wants to tar McCain? What makes Obama believe he can have it both ways?


Related Link:

The New Left's hatred of real liberalism
     

When you can't debate, restrict your opponent

This is what the left does all the time. They can't advance their ideas through debate because they won't hold up to scrutiny. So they try to control the terms of the debate, to prevent their opponent from actually debating. Rich Lowry at Townhall.com gives us a perfect example of this, with Obama's campaign:

The Obama Rules

[...] After his blowout win in North Carolina last week, Obama turned to framing the rules of the general election ahead, warning in his victory speech of "efforts to distract us." The chief distracter happens to be the man standing between Obama and the White House, John McCain, who will "use the very same playbook that his side has used time after time in election after election."

[...]

Forget "bitter"; Obama must believe that most Americans suffer from an attention-deficit disorder so crippling that they can't concentrate on their own interests or values.

Obama has an acute self-interest in so diagnosing the American electorate. His campaign knows he's vulnerable to the charge of being an elitist liberal. Unable to argue the facts, it wants to argue the law -- defining his weaknesses as off-limits.

The campaign can succeed in imposing these rules on the race only if the news media cooperate.

[...]

Here are the Obama rules in detail: He can't be called a "liberal" ("the same names and labels they pin on everyone," as Obama puts it); his toughness on the war on terror can't be questioned ("attempts to play on our fears"); his extreme positions on social issues can't be exposed ("the same efforts to distract us from the issues that affect our lives" and "turn us against each other"); and his Chicago background too is off-limits ("pouncing on every gaffe and association and fake controversy"). Besides that, it should be a freewheeling and spirited campaign.

Democrats always want cultural issues not to matter because they are on the least-popular side of many of them, and want patriotic symbols like the Pledge of Allegiance and flag pins to be irrelevant when they can't manage to nominate presidential candidates who wholeheartedly embrace them (which shouldn't be that difficult). As for "fear" and "division," they are vaporous pejoratives that can be applied to any warning of negative consequences of a given policy or any political position that doesn't command 100 percent assent. In his North Carolina speech, Obama said the Iraq War "has not made us safer," and that McCain's ideas are "out of touch" with "American values." How fearfully divisive. [...]

Lowry goes on to say that we could take these rules by Obama in good faith, if Obama also applied them to the way the talks about John McCain. But does Obama follow his own rules? Or do they only apply to John McCain and Republicans? Read the whole thing and find out.

Selective Outrage and the Rule of Law

In this essay, Victor David Hanson examines the phenomena of people and groups who disrespect, disregard and work to destroy the rule of law, but who are then upset when it doesn't magically reappear to support THEM:

Hypocrisy That Undermines Civilization

There is only a thin veneer that separates civilization from man's innate barbarity. Some 2,500 years ago the historian Thucydides once warned us about the irony of revolutionaries and insurrectionists destroying this fragile patina of culture, as if they themselves might be exempt from ever wanting it back again.

Yet no sooner, he warned, have such outsiders torn down the system of law than they are in need of it themselves when they assume power and the responsibility of governance. Even the worst terrorist apparently wants his wife and kids to be safe--and able to drink clean water when turning on the faucet. The trick apparently is to blow up the neighborhood's electric pylon while still finding enough light and power to assemble an IED device. [...]

He goes on to give examples of this dynamic in action in Iraq; among the Palestinians; and throughout Muslim cultures generally, in the Middle East and abroad.

He also examines the same thing happening in Mexico:

[...] To facilitate such massive illegal immigration, Mexican officials hector their American counterparts about our supposed illiberality in not letting millions more stream in unchecked. They have even gone so far as to publish a government comic book instructing their own citizens how to cross the American border safely--and in flagrant violation of our laws.

But Mexico has nearly the same problem with its own 600-mile southern border with Guatemala as we do with our own 1,800-mile common boundary with Mexico. Hundreds of thousands of Central and Southern Americans try to cross into Mexico, either to work as cheap laborers or to make their way eventually into the United States as competitors to illegal aliens from Mexico.

In response, Mexico's policy toward illegal immigrants on its southern border is as brutal as America's is humane. Violators are often summarily deported--if they are not first robbed by Mexican officials or beaten and killed by criminal gangs. Mexicans may lecture Americans about our purported sins in trying to secure our border, but they don't seem to care what their own government does to Guatemalans. Again, the irony arises that a government that has abandoned the rule of international law suddenly is worried that another country may be doing to it what it does to others.

What lies behind this abject hypocrisy of first undermining civilization and then demanding that it reappear in the hour of need?

Double standards depend on demanding from United States and Europe a sort of impossible perfection. When such utopianism is not--and never can be--met, cheap accusations of racism, colonialism, and imperialism follow. Such posturing is intended to con the West into feeling guilty, and, with such self-loathing, granting political concessions, relaxing immigration, or handing over more foreign aid. Left unsaid is that such critics of the West will always ignore their own hypocrisy, and, when convenient, destroy civilized norms while expecting someone else to restore them when needed.[...]

(bold emphasis mine) I call it the dishonest side of Multiculturalism at work. So what's to be done about it? Victor has some thoughts about that. Read the whole thing, it's not very long.


Related Links: (From Fjordman at the Brussels Journal blog)

The Great Conversation

[...] It is true that if you cannot define your enemy, your criticism is bound to be vague. But this is part of my point: I, and numerous others with at least average intelligence, have spent a considerable amount of time trying to analyze the doctrines of Multiculturalism. We have found this to be quite challenging, precisely because it is vague, incoherent and doesn’t have any clear philosophical foundation. Multiculturalism seems to be a curious mix of older, Enlightenment ideas such as Rousseau’s “noble savage” and later Marxist ideas, among other things. There are those who claim that it was never supposed to be logically consistent and that we shouldn’t look for any cohesive, rational arguments behind it because there are none. What little can be discerned from its ideas is sometimes quite disturbing, with elements of anti-Western hatred, totalitarian impulses and Utopian ideas involving large-scale social engineering.

But isn’t this alarming? Multiculturalism is now official state policy in many countries, together accounting for hundreds of millions of people. Isn’t it disturbing that millions of people are subject to a radical ideology that is almost impossible to comprehend, and thus to criticize? Many of its proponents seem to know that it cannot be rationally defended, which is why they simply shut critics down with charges of racism and shame them into silence whenever they sense some opposition. In fact, it is now more or less illegal in some countries to criticize it, although it could mean the most massive transformation of our countries in modern history. [...]

On Bureaucracy, Liberty and the Rule of Law

[...] When does the rule of law break down? It breaks down when laws are no longer passed with the consent of free people, when citizens no longer feel that the law is just, when regulations become so numerous that it is virtually impossible even for decent individuals not to break the law on a regular basis and when the authorities are incapable of protecting their country’s borders while criminals rule the streets. It breaks down when the law appears increasingly arbitrary, when it invades the most intimate details of the life of law-abiding citizens while it allows great freedom to criminals. In short, it breaks down when it no longer corresponds to reality and to the sense of justice experienced by ordinary people. [...]

     

Only in Marin... I wish!

Al Gore made an appearance at the Marin Civic Center to promote his book. The ZombieTime Blog has plenty of photos:

Al Gore Appearance at the Marin Civic Center


Al is starting to look more and more like Chairman Mao these days.



The Marinites came in droves, in there SUVs and sports cars, to hear Al preach about global warming.





Click the link to see more pics of what 2,000 hypocrites look like. And their car bumper stickers and Che bags too.

When I moved to California nearly 26 years ago, people would often say "Only in Marin" about this sort of thing. Actually, I wish it was only in Marin County that this type of hypocrisy goes on. Now it's not limited to there, but it IS still typical for Marin. Unfortunately it also would seem it's becoming increasingly mainstream among Democrats.