As the late Tony Snow remarked when he was White House press secretary, "The New York Times and other news organizations ought to think long and hard about whether a public's right to know, in some cases, might overwrite somebody's right to live."

Blankley trenchantly recounts left-wing hacks like CNN's Jack Cafferty and Newsweek's Jonathan Alter finding the seeds of a "full-blown dictatorship" in the Bush White House, and snarling Joe Conason claiming Bush was headed toward an "authoritarian peril." Blankley dismisses these claims for showing "an embarrassing ignorance of the history of executive authority."

This is censorship: President Lincoln shut down dozens of newspapers and imprisoned their editors. During World War I, President Woodrow Wilson's Sedition Act banned "uttering, printing, writing or publishing any disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language about the United States government or the military." At least 75 periodicals were banned by the postmaster general. During World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt gave FBI director J. Edgar Hoover the power to censor all news or communications entering or leaving America. Blankley notes FDR repeatedly asked his attorney general, Francis Biddle, "When are you going to indict the seditionists?"

These presidents are hailed by Obama supporters as all-time greats, not as full-blown dictators.

By contrast, during those allegedly dictatorial Bush years, our national newspapers proudly published op-eds by founders and supporters of terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. Blankley invites us to imagine opening the paper during World War II to find "a direct appeal to the American people from a top official of Nazi Germany's Propaganda Ministry, or an entreaty from an Imperial Japanese pilot suspected of participating in the attack on Pearl Harbor." It never happened, because censorship policies prohibited it. Look at the degree to which the pendulum has swung: Despite this free publicity for Islamic terrorists, liberal newspaper editors and leftist book authors bemoan the last eight years as a dark time of muzzling opposition.

President Obama has already signaled that it isn't Hamas chieftains he wants to silence, but conservative talk-radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh. Will this new age's "seditionists" be citizens like Limbaugh or Blankley, voices that threaten the "smart power" momentum of Obama as he goes about unraveling the War on Terror?