Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Obama: Intimidation, Censorship Attempt Over Inconvenient Ad



Story here. ht: Drudge Report

Attempting to intimidate advertisers.

Attempting to get state apparatus to censor politically inconvenient free speech.


Sounds rather similar to some of what the likes of brutal dictators Vladimir Putin and Robert Mugabe did during their so-called "election" campaigns.

That's what Barack Obama's got going on. He's trying to, by proxy at least, silence those who dare to tell Americans the inconvenient truth about Mr. Obama.

DENVER (AP) - Barack Obama is striking back fiercely and swiftly to stamp out an ad that links him to a 1960s radical, eager to demonstrate a far more aggressive response to attacks than John Kerry did when faced with the 2004 "Swift Boat" campaign.

Obama not only aired a response ad to the spot linking him to William Ayers, but he sought to block stations the commercial by warning station managers and asking the Justice Department to intervene. The campaign also planned to compel advertisers to pressure stations that continue to air the anti-Obama commercial.

(...)

Obama's target is an ad by the conservative American Issues Project, a nonprofit group that questions Obama's ties to Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground organization that took credit for a series of bombings, including nonfatal explosions at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol four decades ago.


(...)

"It seems they protest a bit too much," American Issues Project spokesman Christian Pinkston said. "They're going all of these routes—through threats, intimation—to try to thwart the First Amendment here because they don't have an argument on merit."

Cue the violins, please...