If this is the shape of things to come, the First Amendment is dead.

The Obama campaign has lined up prosecutors across Missouri — a key battleground state — including two prominent St. Louis district attorneys and the St. Louis County sheriff “to target anyone who lies or runs a misleading television ad during the presidential campaign,” according to reports from St. Louis CBS affiliate KMOV.

The “chilling effect” on free speech should be clear enough:  according to prosecutors, if you say anything “personal” (which the Obama campaign has defined as discussing his employment by unrepentant confessed terrorist Bill Ayers, for instance) or “dishonest” (such as suggesting that Obama won’t cut taxes for everyone making less than $250,000), they will target you.  These are their own words.

Since both of the things just cited are central issues to the campaign, what this means is simple:  if you’re for John McCain, expect a middle-of-the-night visit from the sheriff.

Will people actually be prosecuted for disagreeing with Obama?  No one says.  No one has to.  Presumably the First Amendment is still the law in Missouri.  But few Americans would claim to be experts on campaign law, everyone knows you can get in trouble for accidentally violating it, and crucially, when your local prosecutors have promised to be completely one-sided in their enforcement, how many donors and activists will want to hire the army of lawyers they’ll need, “just in case”?

Remember that old 1970s book Winning Through Intimidation?  Barack Obama does.

Watch the KMOV video yourself and see how excited you’d be to publicly disagree with Obama in St. Louis this week:

To his great credit, Governor Matt Blunt responded Saturday:

“St. Louis County Circuit Attorney Bob McCulloch, St. Louis City Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce, Jefferson County Sheriff Glenn Boyer, and Obama and the leader of his Missouricampaign Senator Claire McCaskill have attached the stench of police state tactics to the Obama-Biden campaign.

“What Senator Obama and his helpers are doing is scandalous beyond words, the party that claims to be the party of Thomas Jefferson is abusing the justice system and offices of public trust to silence political criticism with threats of prosecution and criminal punishment.

“This abuse of the law for intimidation insults the most sacred principles and ideals ofJefferson. I can think of nothing more offensive to Jefferson’s thinking than using the power of the state to deprive Americans of their civil rights. The only conceivable purpose of Messrs. McCulloch, Obama and the others is to frighten people away from expressing themselves, to chill free and open debate, to suppress support and donations to conservative organizations targeted by this anti-civil rights, to strangle criticism of Mr. Obama, to suppress ads about his support of higher taxes, and to choke out criticism on television, radio, the Internet, blogs, e-mail and daily conversation about the election.

“Barack Obama needs to grow up. Leftist blogs and others in the press constantly say false things about me and my family. Usually, we ignore false and scurrilous accusations because the purveyors have no credibility. When necessary, we refute them. Enlisting Missourilaw enforcement to intimidate people and kill free debate is reminiscent of the Sedition Acts - not a free society.”

But this is not about growing up.  Nor is this isolated.  In August, Obama General Counsel Bob Bauer called for Harold Simmons to be jailed for financing an ad truthfully linking Obama to his former employer Bill Ayers (who, once again, is a confessed and unrepentant terror bomber, and therefore presumably a legitimate target for scrutiny in, oh, a Presidential election).  Bauer, whose position suggests he is high on Obama’s short list for potential Attorneys General or Supreme Court Justices, didn’t stop at a press conference, but demanded immediate criminal prosecution for Simmons’ (almost certainly legal) political contribution in two separate formal letters to the Justice Department.

Likewise, around the same time, Obama supporters organized thousands of people to disrupt on-air interviews and bombard radio stations with emails threatening the loss of their broadcast license for interviewing an Obama opponent.  And earlier in the summer, a new liberal group led by former MoveOn Washington Director Tom Matzzie sent threatening letters to 10,000 known Republican donors, outlining “what might happen to them” if they broke campaign laws, accidentally or otherwise.

Note that no one is doing this to the left.  And that all this is happening while liberal groups are setting all-time fundraising records and conservative donations are at record lows.  And that this is utterly unprecedented behavior in America.  Not everywhere.  But certainly in America.

Using the threat of prosecution and jail to suppress and control political opinions is bad enough:  who is going to be the judge of what is true, or even what is important?  But using the threat to benefit only one side — and to say so — and to say that anyone who opposes a particular candidate “will be targeted” by police?

Well, there’s a word for that.

And it’s a word you can expect to see a lot more of in an Obama Justice Department, FBI, and Supreme Court.

UPDATE:  Just FYI, the Simmons ad (about Obama and Ayers) is below:

UPDATE 2:  Obama threatens Pennsylvania TV stations for running NRA ads.  It just keeps getting worse.

Next Post: Burning Down the House: How Democrats Created the Mortgage Crisis

Technorati Tags: Bill Ayers, Election 2008, First Amendment, Free Speech, Harold Simmons, MoveOn, NRA, Obama

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