Freedom... or "freedom"?

Along the same lines as my post yesterday about the press 'minders', I saw a good article in Slate this morning about the use of propaganda by the current administration. Bush, Rove, and the GOP strategists behind them have honed their abilities of media management and message control to a fine edge. They have developed the lessons they learned from the Nixon and Reagan administrations into an operational philosophy that has allowed them to exploit every opportunity available to push forward their political agenda.

The question this leads me to is what effect does this strategy have upon the minds of the younger generation, whose formative political development has occurred in our current climate of increasingly limited personal freedoms and "with-us-or-against-us" jingoism?

It just so happens that Bob Herbert started to answer this question in his column today in the NYT (registration required). According to a study cited by Herbert,

"Only about half of America's high school students think newspapers should be allowed to publish freely, without government approval of their stories. And a third say the free speech guarantees of the First Amendment go "too far.""

A result of this sort is highly disturbing, and leads me to believe that the strategy of this administration is doing more harm than any of us might have imagined. For all his talk about "freedom", the Bush administration has continued to imply that, in this country, freedom is dangerous to our... freedom. Examples of the administrations support of "freedom" include "free speech zones" at his rallies, watch lists at presidential appearances, indefinite imprisonment of "enemy combatants" (or even "little old ladies from switzerland") without appeal, arrest threats due to vocal dissent, and threats of FCC action against television stations running ads disagreeable to the RNC.

Pardon me for sounding shrill, but this smacks of the beginnings of an Orwellian government apparatus slowly but surely being constructed right under our noses.

But back to my original point. This is the environment in which the next generation of political minds are growing up. They are clearly being affected by the institutionalization of idea that dissent is unpatriotic, and unquestioning loyalty to our leaders is a qualification for citizenship. It's a world where the truth is relative, and where our goverment "makes its own reality".

It is up to the progressives and the Democratic party to engage this dishonesty head on, and act like a true opposition party. We must continue to filibuster, continue to vocally disagree during the SOTU, and continue to respond tirelessly to the untruths and misinformation with fact, reason, and the knowledge that our forefathers, and founding fathers, would agree and support us in our dissent. It is in those very acts of dissent that we find the true nature of our patriotism.