Bush Calls for Constitutional Amendment Protecting Pandering

Washington, D.C., June 28, 2006 -- During a speech delivered in the White House Rose Garden, President George W. Bush today made the case for an important new proposed constitutional amendment, the "Defense of Pandering Amendment".

Under the terms of the proposed amendment, it would become unlawful for journalists, lawmakers and private citizens to publicly identify election-year pandering as election-year pandering during the course of an election-year pandering cycle.

Civil and states rights activists and minority lawmakers have already called the proposed amendment "the lowest form of election-year pandering", a characterization for which they could eventually be retroactively prosecuted should the Defense of Pandering Amendment become law.

"What we here in America have got is democratic principles, and one of the most important democratic principles we got here is the one that a politician can do or say anything he needs to to get elected," President Bush said. "I know I did, and look at me where I'm standing here. Rose Garden. And if that means pulling out a bunch of what some people call divisive and unrelevant issues to divide the American public into the for us-es and the against us-es just during the election seasons, that's an important right we have here as an American citizen. DOPA [the Defense of Pandering Amendment] is going to protect that right."

According to the general principles of the proposed Defense of Pandering Amendment, anyone who publicly calls attention to the fact that an issue, such as a proposed constitutional amendment, tabled by lawmakers during an election cycle is nothing more than a ploy intended to boost political capital among base supporters and to further divide the electorate, will be subject to federal prosecution.

(Due to the increasing prevalence of federally-monitored covert listening devices in American homes, "publicly" is defined for the purposes of DOPA as including any form of print, television, radio or electronic media as well as "out loud", even if the characterization is voiced in a whisper by a citizen who at the time is standing in his own house in, for example, the shower.)

"It's all about protecting free speech," Tony Snow, President Bush's press secretary, said in an interview on Fox News' Brit Hume Special Report. "The Defense of Pandering amendment will let people like Senator Wayne Allard, for example, sponsor something like the Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA), an amendment discriminating against same-sex couples, without being unfairly accused of pandering to the part of the electorate that finds gay people distasteful and doesn't mind letting the federal government trample all over states' rights if that suits their own personal bigotry -- in other words a big part of the Republican base."

"When someone in the journalistic community identifies that kind of thing as 'pandering'," Mr. Snow continued, "that's a negative connotation that people like Senator Wayne Allard don't like to be associated with. DOPA will help stop that kind of thing, and protect the free speech rights of patriotic God-fearing American people like Senator Wayne Allard."

President Bush said DOPA is also essential to protecting the rights of people like Senator Bill Frist, who during each election cycle argues vehemently for the so-called Flag Desecration Amendment, also known as the flag-burning amendment, a proposed constitutional amendment to limit Americans' rights to freedom of speech, itself theoretically guaranteed under the Constitution.

"Every time Bill Frist pulls that old nag out of the barn, some smarty-pants in the liberal media says he's pandering to conservative Republicans. And that's just not fair to Bill Frist," President Bush said.

According to Senator Bill Frist, himself a key sponsor of the Defense of Pandering Amendment, DOPA is scheduled to be debated in the Senate over the next several months. The vital debate will leave little room on the congressional docket for discussion of other issues of minor importance to Americans, such as health care, homeland security, education, the energy crisis, or the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, until sometime after November.

"That's a price I'm more than willing to pay," Senator Frist said, "if it means getting real constitutional protection so that we elected officials can pander as much as we want to to whoever we want to without fear of unfair reprisal."

By Ion Zwitter, Avant News Editor