Dissent and the Right Not To Be Fair and Balanced:
A few years ago, the Rude Pundit found himself in Birmingham, Alabama, doing some righteous readin' and researchin' on the civil rights movement in that fine town with its fine barbecued ribs. Visiting the 16th Street Baptist Church, which was not only the site where a bomb killed four little girls back in 1963, but also as a meeting place for civil rights activists, the Rude Pundit spoke to a woman who was a parishioner and was at a good many of those meetings. No FBI or police attended the meetings, she proudly said, so they were able to speak freely.

Problem was that she was wrong. The Rude Pundit had already been looking at archival documents in downtown Birmingham, and he read reports written for that cracker bastard, Police Commissioner Bull Connor, he of the firehoses and dogs vs. children fame. The documents clearly stated that the Birmingham cops were in the church at the meetings. The Rude Pundit also read FBI reports from agents who were inside the church during meetings when, say, Martin Luther King spoke. COINTELPRO was in full swing by then, and Hoover, his Woolworth's panties in a wad over the civil rights movement, was trying to destroy anything that smacked of leftism, but the Rude Pundit doesn't know if the FBI agents in the reports he read were undercover.

And while one could say that it's naive to think that such a public meeting would go unmonitored during a time of such deep paranoia and mistrust, what if the FBI or the cops wanted to not only attend, but speak? Was Fred Shuttlesworth obligated to allow the police, the very people who wanted to intimidate the blacks in attendance to re-learn their place, a forum to speak, too? Would it have been possible for those meetings to go forth the way they did, for movements to start and flourish? If you think so, then you are a fucking idiot who believes that it is possible to be "objective" in this world, a Fox "News"-watching drool monkey who masturbates to lies about fairness and balance.

The reason the Rude Pundit brings this up is a little incident that took place in Three Oaks, Michigan. See, it seems that on March 14, Chellie Pingree, President of Common Cause, was on a panel at a forum on open government. The panel was sponsored by the area League of Women Voters. Seems that in the course of the forum, Pingree, in the spirit of the event, criticized the Patriot Act and its invasion of privacy. This prompted Michigan FBI agent Al DiBrito to call Susan Gilbert, head of the sponsoring group, to say that Pingree was "way off base" and that the FBI should have had the red carpet rolled out for them in order to correct perceived misinformation about the Patriot Act. And while the FBI denies that DiBrito acted on orders of general surveillance of possible "subversive" activity, his office defends his actions.

In a press release, Pingree says, "It is troubling to think that the FBI would scrutinize my remarks about the Patriot Act at a public meeting organized by the League of Women Voters. Surely the FBI's resources could be put to better use...Why should a citizen meeting on open government merit the attention of the FBI?"

As the Rude Pundit said, this is a minor incident. But are not smaller incidents indicative of larger ills? The cough can just be a cough. Or it could be the flu. Or lung cancer. Paranoid times make hypochondriacs of us all.

DiBrito told Gilbert that someone from the Michigan assistant U.S. attorney general's office would contact her to set her straight on the Patriot Act. Seems like she already got her lesson.