If you are a part of the problem you are the problem

President Bush has been summoning newspaper editors lately in an effort to prevent publication of stories he considers damaging to national security.

Liberal press my ass


He skillfully uses the press (which smacks of Rove, as Bush has not exhibited skill at anything, ever) not to protect our national virtue but to protect his poll numbers. The security of this nation does not enter in to the equation. The real bad guys here are not the admin for trying this stunt, but the papers themselves for allowing it work.

Jefferson said many things about this sort of thing.

Among them:


"It is so difficult to draw a clear line of separation between the abuse and the wholesome use of the press, that as yet we have found it better to trust the public judgment, rather than the magistrate, with the discrimination between truth and falsehood. And hitherto the public judgment has performed that office with wonderful correctness." --Thomas Jefferson to M. Pictet, 1803. ME 10:356

"The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers... [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper." --Thomas Jefferson to G. K. van Hogendorp, Oct. 13, 1785. (*) ME 5:181, Papers 8:632