Ed Meese
“I believe that Ed Meese- being a person without any honor, a fat bastard, really a congenital cheap pig in the style of and on the level of Richard Nixon- should be locked in a concrete basement with an elk. And the elk should be ram-fed full of acid before he’s put in there”
Hunter S. Thompson
http://www.hotlikesauce.com/2009/12/13/3936/
The Meese Commission
With the election of Ronald Reagan as President in 1980, the United States entered a new era. The reassertion of traditional moral values was seen by some analysts to be part of an overall conservative realignment, due in part to the aging of the baby-boom generation. However, while polls showed a renewed appreciation for traditional values, tolerance of Americans for the right of others to reject those values showed no corresponding decline (Stengel, R. et al. 13). An example can be seen in the results of a referendum in Maine on June 10, 1986, when voters there were asked to approve a new statute designed to "make it a crime to make, sell, give for value or otherwise promote obscene material in Maine." The vote was 16,101 for and 48,976 against. The people of one of the more conservative states seem to be "unambiguous in their dislike of censorship and the busybodies who promote it" (Hertzberg 23).
In connection with the signing of the Child Protection Act of 1984, President Reagan announced his intention to set up a commission to study pornography, apparently with the goal of obtaining results more acceptable to his conservative supporters than the conclusions of the 1970 Commission. The result was the appointment by Attorney General Edwin Meese in the spring of 1985 of a panel comprised of 11 members, the majority of whom had established records as anti-pornography crusaders (Wilcox 941).
The Meese Commission
http://home.earthlink.net/~durangodave/html/writing/Censorship.htm
Our Teflon President and his Attorney General, Edwin "There Is No There There" Meese III, have thrown a big, juicy bone to the mad dog packs of the New Christian Right. The Justice Department recently appointed a Commission with the mandate to overturn the 1970 Presidential Commission on Pornography's finding that there is no evidence of a link between sexually explicit materials and delinquent or criminal behavior. The final report of this new Commission, published in July, 1986, holds out the hope that by using draconian measures against pornography we can turn America into a rerun of "Leave It to Beaver." The Commission's findings should placate the lowest common denominator of the citizenry who made a drugstore cowboy our Chief Executive--those folks who believe the Bible should be taken literally, but the First Amendment should not.
In a press conference to announce selection of Commission members, Meese claimed that since l970, "the content of pornography has radically changed, with more and more emphasis upon extreme violence." He also claimed that his Commission "has not come to their task with minds made up. Their job is to approach the issues objectively...In any recommendation the commission makes, it will carefully balance the need to control the distribution of pornography with the need to protect very carefully first amendment freedoms." [1]
....
The report also makes generous use of feminist antiporn rhetoric. New York Women Against Pornography (WAP) helped the Commission staff locate witnesses who testified as "victims of pornography," but at some point it occurred to WAP leaders that it was time to duck the charge of being tools of the state. Dorchen Leidholdt (along with several other WAP leaders) had been willing to testify before the Commission in Washington, D.C., but on the first day of the New York hearings, she led a demonstration against them--the critical edge of which was blunted a little when an officer of the court opened the gate and escorted the WAPettes to a microphone at the witness stand. Chairman Henry Hudson even asked for a copy of her remarks to enter into the record!
http://www.webcitation.org/5zxNbOev8
