Richard Perle, Ann Coulter and America's savage Regression

(Please address the questions and concerns raised in this fine piece by Maureen Farrell: )

Thirty-five years ago, Walter Cronkite returned from a visit to Vietnam and challenged President Lyndon Johnson's promises about American victories. "We've been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington," he said, "to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds. For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate."

"If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost the country," Johnson later remarked.

Can you imagine President Bush making a similar observation of any newscaster?

These days, as veterans like Helen Thomas are "called out" and her successors toss powder puffs during puppet show press conferences, good journalists are hard to find. And it seems, as with Afghanistan, few will be reporting from Iraq at all. According to the BBC's Kate Adie, the Pentagon is warning it will shoot down satellite uplink positions of independent journalists stationed there and is "threatening freedom of information" even before the war starts.

To make matters worse, as the shades go down in Baghdad, another oppressive phenomenon is occurring on the home front. Michael Savage, who advocates arresting leaders of the antiwar movement once combat starts, uses his MSNBC platform to call for a return to yesteryear, 1918 specifically, when the Sedition Act was all the rage.

The Sedition Act, for those too young to remember Eugene Debs, made speaking out against the government a punishable offense. "Whoever, when the United States is at war," the document reads (before listing several seditious offenses). . . "shall willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States. . . shall be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both."

Would Walter Cronkite's Vietnam stance make him a right wing target today? Probably. Because just one day after Savage's televised appeal to criminalize active dissent, Richard Perle told CNN's Wolf Blitzer that journalist Seymour Hersh "is the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist." And now that Sean Penn, George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Spike Lee and other celebrates have been blacklisted from speaking at the Oscars, McCarthyism is all the rage. Who would have thought that the '70s, with its Farrah Faucett posters and Captain and Tennille duets, would ever be considered a Golden Age of Enlightenment?

What has happened to America? How has it regressed beyond recognition? More and more, it looks as if our nation is taking a giant leap backwards in terms of leadership, the media and the quality of our national debate. Since the Federal Communications Commission eliminated the Fairness Doctrine in the mid 1980s, many broadcasters haven't even attempted to present balanced coverage of controversial issues. And though the Chicago Sun Times recently announced that talk radio was "the key to GOP victory," (showing how effective this shilling can be), media personalities and government spokesman are becoming increasingly hostile as they propel us towards war -- especially in their attempts to squelch dissent.

Link to entire essay here.