Of the dozens of reasons to be concerned about the ever-growing and unchecked power of the federal government under President Barack Obama, the upcoming assault against conservative talk radio may surpass them all.

It’s not enough that liberals dominate the executive and legislative branches, liberals are poised to control the judiciary, and, at liberals’ direction, government is absorbing ownership and control of large chunks of the private sector. They must also shut up the opposition.

We have genuine cause for alarm on multiple fronts – and actual alarm indeed exists among increasing numbers of people, not all of whom are predisposed to excitability.

The government has declared war on innocent life in the womb in the name of “free choice.” It is spending unconscionable amounts of money it doesn’t have and can’t possibly acquire without taxing the primary producers in this nation into abject servitude. It’s set to impose “cap and trade” taxes in the name of protecting an environmental threat that exists mostly in the data-resistant prisons of their ideological minds, which will yield no environmental benefit but will cause irreparable economic harm.

It has passed constitutionally repugnant and morally odious legislation, carving out new crimes for violent acts motivated by “hate” against certain protected groups. Neither military veterans nor conservative males are among the protected groups, but pedophiles very well may be. The proscribed “hate” under the statute may not be “hate” at all, but mere political or theological disagreement with the view of the dominant media culture and the ruling class on, for example, the normalcy of homosexual behavior. Meanwhile this same ruling class and its enablers, who are so selectively indignant about certain majority opinions they mischaracterize as “hate,” openly bask in the kind of behavior no one can rationally dispute as hateful at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

The government, through President Obama, has trotted the globe, painting the United States, the most magnanimous nation in the history of the world, as an international pariah and disgrace for which he must presume to apologize.

The government would have prosecuted officials of the previous administration for conducting enhanced interrogation techniques they reasonably believed were legal – and the lawyers who furnished the legal opinions approving the techniques – until it discovered, with egg on its face, that in a recent case, an appellate court – and the Justice Department, in another – had endorsed the prior administration’s definition of torture.

The government threatens and intimidates creditors into transferring wealth to the administration’s friends in labor. It uses taxpayer money to fund nefarious enterprises, such as ACORN, to engage in widespread illegal activities designed to corrupt and skew the census, elections and other democratic processes as we watch, with mouths agape, seemingly powerless – for now – to stop it.

The government is a heartbeat away from nationalizing health care based on deliberate misinformation about the nation’s uninsured and despite the 100 percent failure rate of such fantastic reforms elsewhere on the globe.

This government has declared a false moral equivalence between the respective behaviors of democratic Israel and Palestinians committed to the extinction of Israel. It will attempt to force the Israelis to accept the twin suicidal concessions of relinquishing strategic real estate vital to its security and agreeing to the “return” of millions of Palestinian refugees. It appears to have abandoned any pretense of preventing Iran – a nation also committed to Israel’s extermination – from acquiring nuclear weapons while encouraging Israel, instead, to disarm.

But of all the unfolding outrages, I doubt any will ignite true patriots more than the imminent resurrection of the government’s war on conservative talk radio. If we can’t even express political dissent, the nation we’ve known as a bastion of individual liberty will be no more.

President Obama, in classic misdirection, has proclaimed that he will not support efforts to reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine, through which the government would silence conservative talkers in the name of achieving “balance.”

But he doesn’t have to support the Fairness Doctrine to accomplish the same sinister goal when Congress and the Federal Communications Commission will do his dirty work for him. WorldNetDaily reports that Michael J. Copps, acting FCC chairman, has denounced the lack of racial and gender diversity in the broadcast industry as “a shameful state of affairs.” Unsurprisingly, his proposed corrective is to force the transfer of station ownership to greater numbers of minorities, who are statistically more likely to carry liberal talk shows.

Let the record emphatically reflect that conservatives have never tried to use government to shut down the liberal media monopoly in network television and major newspapers, under the deceitful pretense of achieving balance or otherwise.

Let the record also reflect that if this administration presses forward with this overreach, it might finally jolt the complacent among us out of their stubborn naiveté and apathy.

COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.