If you want to see the place where the standard Republican/conservative "Ungawa! Government Bad!" line goes to die, check out the resistance to the FCC's announcement that it treat the Internet as a public utility, rather than simply another vast savanna on which corporate predators can fatten themselves. Take, for example,rookie Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, who doesn't know what he's talking about, but he means what he says, goddammit.

Protect Internet Freedom, a new but obscure group rallying opposition to the FCC plan, sent an email to supporters - signed by Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) - with a subject line comparing the proposal to putting Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Barack Obama in charge of the Internet. That message taps into a recurring Republican argument that giving the federal government any new authority to regulate Internet service will make it hard for the U.S. to denounce countries like Russia and China that it accuses of online censorship and curbs on freedom of speech. But the FCC's plan would hardly put Obama in charge of the Internet, much less Putin. It would tighten FCC regulations, not hand control to the White House or the Kremlin.

This is, of course, premised on the theological conservative belief that any government regulation of any kind -- even those meant to make rapacious corporations at least pretend to be good citizens -- is the first long step toward Tiananmen Square. This is, of course, not based on anything resembling empirical reality. But get away from the fantasies of actual US Senators, and into the Wild Kingdom of the conservative media, and things get even more loopy.

Rios claimed that net neutrality will give government bureaucrats the power to determine who can start a website, even though that claim is completely false. "I want to set up a website and then bureaucratic regulators will have to give me permission and I will have to pay and they will also see if my content is o.k. to be put out there on the internet," Rios said. "There is no doubt in the long term when the government takes control over not just the capacity to deliver internet services but also gets into the content monitoring game, which every indication is that they are doing that, at that juncture we have a real opportunity for free speech violations," Manning said. "This net neutrality is just one area that President Obama has been engaged in a wholesale assault on First Amendment rights."

In the FCC's decision, there is no more a "long-term" plot for government control of Internet content than there is in Agenda 21 an actual secret plan to steal our golfs. All the FCC is doing is making sure that greed-gobblers like Comcast don't get to decide which content to promote and which content to bury. Rarely is seen so clearly the modern conservative notion of civil liberties -- the government cannot abridge your rights, even in an imaginary sense, but its real function is to subcontract that to anyone whose bid is high enough. Not what the Founders had in mind, I don't believe.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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