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President Obama: We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States. Because if somebody is able to intimidate folks out of releasing a satirical movie, imagine what they start doing when they see a documentary that they don’t like or news reports that they don’t like. Or even worse, imagine if producers and distributors and others start engaging in self-censorship because they don’t want to offend the sensibilities of somebody whose sensibilities probably need to be offended. So that’s not who we are. That’s not what America is about. Again, I’m sympathetic that Sony, as a private company, was worried about liabilities and this and that and the other. I wish they had spoken to me first. I would have told them, “Do not get into a pattern in which you’re intimidated by these kinds of criminal attacks.”…I think it says something interesting about North Korea that they decided to have the state mount an all-out assault on a movie studio because of a satirical movie….I love Seth and I love James, but the notion that that was a threat to them, I think gives you some sense of the kind of regime we’re talking about here.
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