Emily Baugh
Calendar Editor
On December 14, 2008, an Iraqi journalist threw a pair of shoes at President Bush at a press conference.
With reason, the Iraqi President, Jalal Talabani, was extremely embarrassed and asked all of the news networks that were at the conference to hand over their tapes of the event. Talabani didn’t want anyone to think badly of the Iraqi people.
However, the U.S. government decided that they would let their news networks keep the tapes they had. A smart move really, if the government had confiscated the tapes, it would have been a violation of the First Amendment.
If the news networks had had their tapes confiscated, hopefully people would have protested. Hopefully people would have been angry. Hopefully people would be afraid for their Constitutional rights.
But in the United States today, only a handful of people still hold their Constitutional rights near and dear to them. Many people would be only too willing to give up their rights for a little “security”.
That would give our government and our leaders too much power, making them pretty much a dictator or tyrant. Our founding fathers didn’t want that to happen, that’s why they created the Constitution and broke away from England.
So the next time you feel like your Constitutional rights are being violated, take a stand and protect your rights.
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1 comment:
I have a couple thoughts.
First, the very fact that this reporter was able to throw his shoes at the President of the United States of America with nothing more than a public apology demonstrates the progress in Iraq. Would an Iraqi reporter from 2002 have been able to insult a foreign dignitary for the world to see and kept his life? Likely not.
Second, the actions of President Talabani demonstrate the progress yet to be made in Iraq. Rather than attempt to hide the incident, he ought to have allowed the actions to be made as public as his reprimand of the reporter's behavior. He also could have used the incident to thank the Iraqi and American security forces for protecting that man's freedom of speech.
Third, the United States' negative response to President Talabani's request reaffirms our own belief in our rights, despite the personal cost. It would have been all too easy for certain media outlets to hide President Bush's smooth handling of the shoe affair by turning in their tapes; instead, they held true to their duty to the American people and kept the footage.
Some closing thoughts:
"Many people would be only too willing to give up their rights for a little security;" but didn't this nation's founding fathers sacrifice their own liberties, their businesses, and even their lives for the security of their posterity's "life, liberty, and ... pursuit of happiness"?
Giving the government power to protect does not make the government tyrannical. It is the votes of the citizens that determine our legislators, those responsible for checking and balancing executive actions.
Our founding fathers were already caught in a tyranny. King George III had Parliament under his thumb, removing the legislative check and exercising limitless authority. The states of America broke away from England, fought a war for independence, and then lived in tension from 1777 to 1788 under the Articles of Confederation, which (as an overreaction to the tyranny of George) granted almost no federal power and, consequently, almost no federal influence in the world abroad and almost no federal protection of the states. The Constitution created a federal government with enough moxie to provide real security, but its version of the United States is carefully designed to contain sufficient balances to protect the sovereign population from the powerful government.
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