If liberals are worried about Free Speech...

We are concerned, as we all should be, about the infringement of our civil liberties by the government. Rightly so; it is, after all, a citizens' duty to preserve his own liberty and defy tyranny.

However, the liberal Think Progress is obsessed with the recent military restrictions on YouTube and MySpace access for our soldiers.

Ironically, it is their own left-wing doing most of the suppression in this Hemisphere. For a real example of government-directed press control, look no further than Venezuela.

Now, I don't want to sound like an alarmist, but there are also forces here at home with virtually the same intent. Far leftists, of all people. Fancy that!

Dennis Kucinich, for example:

Scarcity-obsessed Dennis Kucinich has recently introduced plans in Congress to revive the Fairness Doctrine, which once let government regulators police the airwaves to ensure a balancing of viewpoints, however that's defined. A new Fairness Doctrine would affect most directly opinion-based talk radio, a medium that just happens to be dominated by conservatives. If a station wanted to run William Bennett's show under such a regime, they might now have to broadcast a left-wing alternative, too, even if it had poor ratings, which generally has been the case with liberal talk. Sunstein also proposes a kind of speech redistributionism. For the Internet, he suggests that regulators could impose "electronic sidewalks" on partisan websites (the National Rifle Association's, say), forcing them to link to opposing views. The practical problems of implementing this program would be forbidding, even if it somehow proved constitutional. How many links to opposing views would secure the government's approval? The FCC would need an army of media regulators (much as China has today) to monitor the millions of webpages, blogs, and social-networking sites and keep them in line.

But I don't hear Think Progress whining about this.