"I think that there are impulses in the government every day to second guess and look into the editorial decisions of conservative publishers."

Said Federal Election Commission Chairman Lee E. Goodman, interviewed by Paul Bedard at The Washington Examiner.

“The right has begun to break the left’s media monopoly, particularly through new media outlets like the internet, and I sense that some on the left are starting to rethink the breadth of the media exemption and internet communications,” he added.

Goodman recognizes this as a mistake — or at least talks as though he does.

Noting the success of sites like the Drudge Report, Goodman said that protecting conservative media, especially those on the internet, “matters to me because I see the future going to the democratization of media largely through the internet. They can compete with the big boys now, and I have seen storm clouds that the second you start to regulate them, there is at least the possibility or indeed proclivity for selective enforcement, so we need to keep the media free and the internet free.”

The possibility or indeed proclivity for selective enforcement... and that is the problem. Once you have a complicated system of regulations, anyone who dares to speak calls attention to himself and risks accusations that he's made some misstep, and ordinary self-protective individuals will decide to keep out of the fray altogether. The tendency of those in power in government to see the rule violations in those on the other political side is bad enough as simply a possibility. But here's the Chairman of the FEC saying not just a possibility but a proclivity!

Goodman is a Republican whose chairmanship ends after this year, and he's susceptible to the accusation that he's the one who's behaving politically by getting this warning out there.

But I think the best approach is to assume that everyone with governmental power is political and to advocate the strongest legal protection for freedom of speech so they can't go where their proclivities may take them.

ADDED: In law, we often speak of a "slippery slope," which expresses the idea that if you take one step in a particular direction, the force of gravity will pull you on and on. "Proclivity," the key word in this post, comes from the Latin word for a downward slope, prōclīvitās. Notices that the English word "inclination" contains the same landscape metaphor. Some legal thinkers express contempt for arguments based on this metaphor. Slipping down imaginary hillsides seems like a phobia of puny minds, and better, wiser thinkers have the judgment to safely balance competing values. And yet "balance" is itself a metaphor, a metaphor that allays the very fear of falling that besets the slope avoiders.