Free speech? Who needs it? I guess not The One.

Barack Obama’s campaign hasn’t advertised this a great deal this week, but the campaign’s “Action Wire” has been waging large-scale campaigns against critics. That includes tens of thousands of e-mails to television stations running Harold Simmons’ Bill Ayers ad, and to their advertisers — including a list of major automobile and telecommunications companies.

And tonight, the campaign launched a more specific campaign: an effort to disrupt the appearance by a writer for National Review, Stanley Kurtz, on a Chicago radio program. Kurtz has been writing about Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers, and has suggested that papers housed at the University of Illinois at Chicago would reveal new details of that relationship.

The campaign e-mailed Chicago supporters who had signed up for the Obama Action Wire with detailed instructions including the station’s telephone number and the show’s extension, as well as a research file on Kurtz, which seems to prove that he’s a conservative, which isn’t in dispute. The file cites a couple of his more controversial pieces, notably his much-maligned claim that same-sex unions have undermined marriage in Scandinavia.

Bobby B commented on the story:

I think they’ve profoundly misunderstood part of the process. If Kurtz says something with which the Obama camp disagrees, they should then be presenting to US, the reading public, these same rebuttal arguments, persuading us why we should not believe Kurtz, and why the truth is not as Kurtz describes.

Instead, they want to make certain that we, the reading public, don’t even get to consider Kurtz’s argument, and they try to accomplish this by shutting down the presses. To me, in an era where we cannot seem to arrive at a consensual definition of patriotism, this - shutting down information because you disagree - stopping speech instead of explaining why it’s wrong - is about as unpatriotic an act as I can imagine.

In a country established on the proposition that we, the people, are the sources of power and that only by our voluntary grant does our government take hold of any of that power - on the proposition that we, the people, have rights that originated in and with us (instead of rights simply granted to us by our king or owner or despot) - in a country in which our right to the free flow of information was so paramount that “free speech” was celebrated in our founding documents - Obama’s strategy of keeping us from hearing things about him that don’t make him happy is unpatriotic. It is traitorous to the principles upon which this country was founded.