Somebody needs to introduce our Vice President to the First Amendment to the US Constitution. Y’know… the one about not “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”. Maybe someone could stick a copy in his pocket the next time he slips off to his “undisclosed location“.

That might keep him from having his lawyers send letters to the parody site, whitehouse.org, demanding they take down a fake biography and pictures of Second Lady Lynne Cheney.

The lawyer letter seems to imply that a precedent against using her picture for the purpose of trade trumps the supreme law of the land. Cheney — Mr. Halliburton, to his friends — should ask his buddies on the Supreme Court — the guys and gal who elected him and his boss — for their opinions on the constitutional protections for parody. He should also ask them about the greater burden of proof borne by public figures in matters of libel. (And anyone who has their own page on the Official US Government White House site certainly qualifies as a public figure.)

I wonder if Mr. & Mrs. Cheney and their lawyers ever concerned themselves with the personal privacy implications of the myriad parodies directed at the previous First and Second Ladies?

It’s not that surprising that Mr. I-Had-Other-Priorities-During-The-Vietnam-War Cheney is ignorant about the Constitution, but it is pretty surprising that he has the time to bother with his wife’s hurt feelings. As John Wooden, one of the publishers of whitehouse.org, says in an interview with Salon Magazine, “You would think they’d have better things to do. Fixing our imploding economy, perhaps.” Oh, and that Iraq thing, too…

Access is all to reporters. And with the mainstream press’s performance at the presidential press conference the other night, it is obvious that reporters value their access much more than the truth or their historical watchdog status.

Our government was designed with a series of checks and balances to ensure that, despite the separation of powers, no one branch could trample over the others. According to Professor Paul Johnson of Auburn University, some of the checks and balances work like this:

Over the past several years — and especially since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 — we’ve seen the checks and balances eroding away. Last fall Congress ceded its powers related to declaring war to the President’s discretion. With a compliant Congress, President Bush has yet to use his veto power. The Supreme Court usurped the role of Congress in deciding the outcome of the 2000 Florida elections. The Justice Department and the Vice-President have stonewalled in Congress’s attempts to read documentation related to their oversight of the nation’s finances.

When those checks and balances begin to fail, we look to the press to shine a light on the excesses of a nascent imperial government. As Thomas Jefferson said,

But is the mainstream press doing the job Jefferson expected it would do? It doesn’t seem that way. We’re treated to multiple investigative journalism pieces on Michael Jackson(!), but virtual silence on connections between Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and others in the administration and Saddam Hussein or the Saudi despots or the Enron debacle. There are investigations into Martha Stewart’s alleged insider trading, but how many of the Enron or Worldcom or Tyco or Adelphia principals have been brought to justice? What restictions are journalists agreeing to in return for being “embedded” and getting to play with the army’s hardware in the new Gulf War? Where is the outrage at the limited contact the press has with the President and the Vice-President?

In his first prime-time press conference since the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in October 2001, President Bush presented his prepared remarks and then reiterated those prepared remarks whenever he was asked a question. About the only answer which seemed mildly unscripted was to the ridiculous softball question about how his faith is guiding him. He demonstrated his disdain by dissing Helen Thomas; at 82 years old and a veteran of 40 years and 9 presidents, she has long been given the honor of asking the opening question at the White House. At this conference, however, Bush’s handlers didn’t dare take the chance that Thomas would stray off script.

In the days when the checks and balances actually seemed to work, the press was sometimes referred to as “the fourth branch of government” for its ability to offset the the power of the three constitutional branches.

Unfortunately for the citizenry, the “fourth branch” has become just as compromised as the other three; where that description was once a badge of honor, it has now become a shameful epithet. As journalist Salim Muwakkil has said

How dare librarians not practice civil disobedience when the FBI comes storming into their libraries demanding they hand over their circulation records! How dare they avoid their ethical duty to protect their patrons at the cost of their own freedom! How dare librarians (and near-minimum-wage bookstore cashiers) obey their employers who have instructed them to comply with requests from law enforcement at risk of their jobs!

Professor David Price is outraged at librarians not standing up for what he believes in. From safe in his ivory tower at leafy St. Martin’s College, where his employer is likely to defend him from any intrusions on his academic freedom, he is very quick to accuse others of being the “equivalent of FBI extension agents” for not risking all to resist an unfair law. In his black-and-white world:

It’s the typical disconnect between academia and the “real” world. Only in academia and religion are there absolutes in human behavior. Everywhere else there are compromises between theory abstracted from existence and the complexity of daily life and its responsibilities. I despise the Patriot Act, and I’ve had a number of discussions (diatribes?) about it with my wife, who manages a large, chain bookstore. When she asked her management about what to do in case the FBI showed up at her store demanding information, they told her to call the corporate office, but not to interfere with the legal execution of the warrant, because, although they have opposed such subpoenas in the past, it is not the individual store’s decision to make. It was obvious to her that no support would be given to individuals who violate the law. Ethically, Dr. Price would say there is simply no question as to what she should do.

Of course, Professor Price’s own ethics are malleable. As far as I remember, there are no codicils to the basic maxim: “Thou shalt not steal.” I am sure that the Benedictine Order who run the College in which he teaches would agree. Yet, in his article, Price relates a story about a conversation with a colleague who, over the past couple of months

Actually, this anecdote reveals nothing about librarians. Rather, in laughing about theft, it reveals Price’s own hypocrisy regarding ethics. Further evidence of his own lack of ethical rigor are his omissions, when quoting from the ALA Code of Ethics, of the following paragraph:

The librarians I know are troubled and distressed by the continuing clampdown on civil liberties and freedoms, exacerbated by opportunistic ideologues in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001. These librarians are often underpaid, underfunded, understaffed, overworked, fearful that their budgets and jobs will be traded for military expenditures. Yet, they remain committed to educating the public and providing access to information, despite attacks from the self-righteous.

The librarians I know are also too ethical to think of blacklisting a book, but long memories are almost a requirement for their jobs. I wonder how many of them will closely evaluate their collections this fall, to see if they really need a book called Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists by David H. Price.