When a politico or flack starts ringing the alarm bells, it always pays to be a bit skeptical about what he or she is saying. I still have some doubts about Bradley Smith's warnings of impending FEC regulation of bloggers, yet I believe it's an important issue about which it pays to be very very clear. Lines in the sand need to be drawn.

Yet The Iron Mouth makes what seems like a sensible appeal to consider the downside of taking what ostensibly and historically has been a Republican argument against campaign finance reform:

But the left loves McCain-Feingold.  So how to get them to hate McCain-Feingold?  Imply that you are going to start to try to shut down free speech and bloggers on the Internet because you are being forced to do so by those hateful Democrats on the Federal Election Commission.  The best way to do that?  How about an interview at CNET entitled "The Coming Crackdown On Blogging." And people ranging from Atrios at Eschaton, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, and Armando at Daily Kos seem to be falling all over themselves trying to make alliances with right-wing bloggers to try and stop the "new law."

People, this is a transparent power play.  There is no new law.  Its just a few off-hand comments one Commissioner made to a reporter at CNET.  Just because Bradley Smith implies the Commission is going to go that way doesn't make it so.  Even the smallest drop of knowledge about First Amendment law would tell you that such an interpretation has probably one of the steepest climbs in all of jurisprudence.  Smith wants to make an end-run around the other members of the committee by undercutting their support.  But they don't need support.  They don't take orders from anyone.  Why would Brad Smith think this?  Because he does.

So before you go and submit a torrent of E-mails to the Democratic members of the FEC, stop and think.  Am I really doing the right thing by reflexively doing the will of the Republican chair of the FEC?

The problem I have with this is that Iron Mouth is claiming that if I fight for my First Amendment rights, I'm somehow "doing the will of the Republican chair of the FEC."

In response, I ask this: So what?

Just because something is unconstitutional doesn't mean that the government won't try doing it. Consider the things the government is doing right now. I don't know about Iron Mouth, but I would rather not have to leave my First Amendment rights up to the current Supreme Court, nor would I want to have to keep a ledger of all the links and clicks and quotes in my blog relating to politics while the inevitable court challenge makes its way ever so slowly through the federal court system.

The thing is, there's is a lot more to the divide in this country than red/blue, left/right, progressive/conservative. There's a more profound divide between the governors and the governed, and more and more these governors are answerable not to the people but to the corporations, the insiders -- those who find it convenient to shut the people up and prevent them from rocking the boat.

Thus "tort reform" that would prevent people from suing corporations. Thus "bankruptcy reform" that would prevent individuals and small business owners from declaring bankruptcy.

And then there are these damn bloggers who don't obey orders and don't just swallow what the establishment feeds them. The DLC doesn't like them. The MSM don't like them. The lobbyists don't like them. The corporations don't like them.

"Time to do something about these bloggers!" they grumble, perhaps in smoke-filled rooms.

Bradley Smith may be playing games, and it's good that The Iron Mouth (and presumably others) are raising questions about his motives. Yet I don't think that means it's time to start waving party banners and digging trenches.

We may have some natural allies on this issue from libertarians on the right who are just as alarmed by the fascistic tendencies being exhibited by our government of late. If it takes an alarm about Democratic flacks to get their attention, well, so be it. But just because these presumably pro-regulation commissioners are Democrats doesn't mean we should turn a blind eye, either.

My believe is that we should stay on this -- and draw the line in the sand. We will not have our First Amendment rights taken away by anybody, not by well-intentioned Democrats, not by neo-facist martinets, not by paternalistic corporations offering "a better internet," not by anybody. The Internet (the free one) offers perhaps the greatest hope for the nurturing and flourishing of democratic (small 'd') ideals, dialogue, activism and engagement, and any threat to that helps enable what I and many see as the real potential for modern industrial societies to fall into despotic corporatocracies.

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