THEY TOLD ME...

"Freedom is compliance"

I noticed a few months ago an amusing bit that Glenn Reynolds was doing on his blog Instapundit. He'd pick a news story and highlight it by saying "they told me [insert calamity here] would happen when President Bush were re-elected... and they were right!" At which point he'd highlight a restriction on freedom or some bad thing that's being done... usually by the president's opponents. He recently did a Google search on those posts and put them on his site in response to a request, which is odd to me since he has a search feature on Instapundit that works just fine.

Here is a partial list:

THEY TOLD ME THAT IF GEORGE W. BUSH WERE RE-ELECTED...

...we'd see objectionable paintings taken down. [Senator Obama's campaign requests paintings be removed before appearance]

...our universities would be run by theocrats who wouldn't brook criticism of religion. [Punishing blasphemy at Tufts University]

...people who criticized the powerful would suffer. [DNC threatens to sue Free Republic website]

...people who dared criticize the government would find themselves roughly silenced. [City Attorney for Pomona demands blog remove post]

...freedom of speech would be on the way out. [proposal to limit citizens from lobbying congress]

...government would be crushing speech it didn't like. [Democrats in Florida balk at station carrying Rush Limbaugh from being allowed to broadcast emergency Hurricane information]

...we'd see A resurgence of anti-blasphemy laws. [SFSU punishes students for blasphemy of Allah]

...those who spoke out to authority would be taken down by its minions. [They tased him, bro]

...simple Internet parodies would be ruthlessly suppressed by a political commissariat. [MoveOn threatens CafePress for parodies]

...jack-booted thugs would be dropping the hammer on anyone deemed guilty of lese majeste. [Italian Restaurant told to take down picture of Chelsea Clinton]

...we'd see political censorship run rampant. [Wesley Clark calls for political discourse to be rated]

...we'd have an authoritarian state where children were encouraged to inform on their parents. [Pediatricians keeping track of pregnant women drinking at ballgames]

...academics would be silenced for offering unwelcome opinions. [Pro Israeli views shunned]

...our society would be riddled with anonymous informers who would rat out politically unacceptable thoughts to the authorities. [College 'rat out the offensive speech' website]

...we'd see loyalty oaths and ideological crushing of dissent on America's campuses. [University of Delaware forces students to agree to PC viewpoints]

...independent filmmakers whose documentaries threatened the established order would be silenced by the minions of the state. [Indoctrinate U movie shunned by media]

...the morality police would be wielding a heavy hand. [Boston attempt to criminalize gambling]

...people would be imprisoned for political activism. [government of Oklahoma tries to stop a petition drive]

...people who even dared to complain about speech restrictions would be in trouble. [Canadian prosecution of a woman complaining about hate speech laws]

...we'd see a sort of soft fascism in which corporate media would freeze out views that were politically uncongenial. [NBC refuses to run pro-troop ads]

...unpopular groups would be subject to beatings and intimidation. [faux hate crimes at Princeton]

...religious zealots, with cooperation from the state, would be crushing the speech of freethinkers. [Canada prosecutes someone who criticizes Islam]

...unaccountable death squads would terrorize American cities, protected by official silence. [Chicago police corruption]

...AND THEY WERE RIGHT!

As has been said before many times, if President Bush was the guy that some people scream he is freely in public, they wouldn't be able to do so. Tyranny shows up from the corners and out of the shadows, and in the US, among the people that the radicals and leftists are least likely to complain about.

President Bush, Tyranny