The Real Thing
Can y'all remember, back in those more prosperous, more productive, happier days of Democratic administrations, how whenever one correct-thinking individual would criticize some idiotic statement that came out of a regressive mouth, that said regressive would yell "Censorship! Censorship!" Remember?
Anyway, we'd often pause, take a breath, and explain calmly that we were not indulging in censorship, that what we were doing was merely exercising our own individual rights as citizens — the same rights as those held by the regressive mouth — to say what we thought of the mouth's thoughts. Censorship is something far more serious, far more insidious, and far more damaging: censorship is when the Government tries to suppress the free expression of its citizens. Censorship inevitably is a tool of tyrrany.
Censorship is the Government barring reporters from entering New Orleans and telling those reporters that there will be no pictures of dead bodies in the devastated city.
The excuses given to suppress photographs of coffins coming home from Iraq were thin but accepted to avoid accusations of anti-patriotism. The current excuses are so thin as to be transparent, an obvious attempt by an embarrassed Government to try to control information to protect itself. That is censorship.