Chilling dissent -- THIS is what chilling dissent is

The left in America loves to thrash and whine endlessly about dissent being chilled, a Bush dictatorship, coming fascist takeover, etc, etc ad nauseum. What they fail to realize, is that if any of their paranoid fantasies were in fact true, they'd not be present to be wailing about them. They would already be dead -- gas bubbles and gator bait out in the everglades, or a shallow grave out in the desert, or fish food dumped in the ocean with logging chain wrapped around'em for ballast.

THIS IS NOT HAPPENING. There are no government death squads out there whacking journalists who write crazy shit about the president or this administration.

NOBODY is out there hunting down and jailing bloggers spouting truther crappola, or similar nonsense.

So against, the relatively placid background of the USA, we are presented with the story below. A journalist in Russia, who was apparently quite an irritant to Putin, who is mysteriously shot dead.

Think of it what you will. We are not even close.

Reuters

Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, an outspoken critic of President Vladimir Putin, was shot dead on Saturday at her apartment block in central Moscow, police said...

...Politkovskaya, a 48-year-old mother of two, won international fame and numerous prizes for her dogged pursuit of rights abuses by Putin's government, particularly in the violent southern province of Chechnya.

"The first thing that comes to mind is that Anna was killed for her professional activities. We don't see any other motive for this terrible crime," said Vitaly Yaroshevsky, a deputy editor of the newspaper where Politkovskaya worked...