The Reticulator

The government of Finland says “Little House on the Prairie” shouldn’t be shown publicly to children.

That would be a show of good judgment if it had been based on the content of the program. I’ve long said that if we’re going to have censorship of television, that should be the first program to go. The producers took good literature and ruined it. Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose had given us some interestingly drawn characters in their books. In the TV series they were turned into typical Hollywood ninnies.

But, alas, it’s only that the government hasn’t reviewed the series. Universal Studies decided not to ask for the Nihil Obstat or the Imprimatur

Conservative Republicans for years have had to put up with hostile questions from LeftDemocrat reporters. It comes with the territory. There is a certain amount of whining and complaining about it from people like myself, but the politicians generally learn to take it in stride. Take, for example, Sarah Palin’s interview with Katie Couric. (I didn’t watch it, but I read a transcript.)

Now Joseph Biden got a small taste of it himself when Barbara West of WFTV asked some hostile questions. She asked her questions in a polite, respectful manner, and Joseph Biden handled them well. He challenged the questioner at a few points — nothing at all wrong with that. His answers were less slimy than the usual political answers — and even revealed a bit of the truth: There will be no Obama tax cuts. There will instead be tax “credits.”

Obama should have been pleased at the way his VP handled himself, but he acts as though Biden is a delicate flower who will wilt when he gets too close to anyone who doesn’t genuflect before the Obama image. Instead of praising the process of give and take, he blacklisted WFTV.

That is not at all an improvement over the George W. Bush’s hostile relationship with the press, and is certainly not behavior worthy of someone who is supposed to be a defender of our First Amendment freedoms.

How is Obama going to handle negotiations with hostile foreign leaders if he can’t handle hostile U.S. news reporters?

In related news:

• Turkey is now tightening control on Internet speech.
• Australia, the UK, and Canada are, too.

I suppose we can take comfort in the fact that Obama appears to be doing no more than riding the wave of repression that’s sweeping the globe.

James Corsi, The author of an anti-Obama book was detained in Kenya and deported. He may (or may not) be a crackpot and his book may be full of lies, but this response looks a lot more like government censorship than a case of, “I may disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Here was a chance for Obama to prove that he means it when, as his web site says, “Obama supports tough, direct presidential diplomacy with Iran without preconditions.”

OK, he’s not president yet but he probably could have some influence in Kenya anyway. Here was a chance for him to call up the President of Kenya and say, “I appreciate that you don’t like this Corsi guy any more than I do, but that’s not how we do things.” He could provide a sample of the diplomacy that he plans to use with leaders of Iraq and other countries to convince Kenya to let the guy be heard. And he would come out looking to Americans like a true defender of civil liberties, allaying those suspicions of those who fear his administration will be one of reprisals against dissidents.