The scariest thing you will hear from Obamunists is the glassy-eyed assertion that their messiah will "unite us." How is the guy with the most extreme left-wing record in the entire Senate going to unite us, when 99% of the public has a less radical point of view? Two words: brute force. Michael Barone offers a few examples of how this is already becoming apparent:

[Obamunists] seem determined to shut people up.

That's what Obama supporters, alerted by campaign emails, did when conservative Stanley Kurtz appeared on Milt Rosenberg's WGN radio program in Chicago. Kurtz had been researching Obama's relationship with unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers in Chicago Annenberg Challenge papers in the Richard J. Daley Library in Chicago — papers that were closed off to him for some days, apparently at the behest of Obama supporters.

Obama fans jammed WGN's phone lines and sent in hundreds of protest emails. The message was clear to anyone who would follow Rosenberg's example. We will make trouble for you if you let anyone make the case against The One.

Other Obama supporters have threatened critics with criminal prosecution. In September, St. Louis County Circuit Attorney Bob McCulloch and St. Louis City Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce warned citizens that they would bring criminal libel prosecutions against anyone who made statements against Obama that were "false." I had been under the impression that the Alien and Sedition Acts had gone out of existence in 1801-02. Not so, apparently, in metropolitan St. Louis. Similarly, the Obama campaign called for a criminal investigation of the American Issues Project when it ran ads highlighting Obama's ties to Ayers.

It's gotten this bad without him even having been elected. Imagine Obama in office, backed up by a solid Democrat majority under the alarmingly irresponsible leadership of Pelosi and Reid. First will come a resurrected Fairness Doctrine, to shut off talk radio. Then they will go after the Internet, so enjoy Right Wing News while you can. After the Internet has been reduced to PBS Online, don't be surprised if they start on your mail.

Obama can count on help not only from Congress, but from the media that has been instrumental in passing him off as a legitimate candidate. Corporate ownership is no guarantee of freedom:

Corporate liberals have done their share in shutting down anti-liberal speech, too. "Saturday Night Live" ran a spoof of the financial crisis that skewered Democrats like House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank and liberal contributors Herbert and Marion Sandler, who sold toxic-waste-filled Golden West to Wachovia Bank for $24 billion. Kind of surprising, but not for long. The tape of the broadcast disappeared from NBC's Website and was replaced with another that omitted the references to Frank and the Sandlers. Evidently NBC and its parent, General Electric, don't want people to hear speech that attacks liberals.

See the original skit here.

Barone notes that Obama has chosen to spend his adult life in the ideological bubble of university communities. This is unlikely to foster respect for the opposition's right to express itself:

Today's liberals seem to be taking their marching orders from […] the college and university campuses where administrators, armed with speech codes, have for years been disciplining and subjecting to sensitivity training any students who dare to utter thoughts that liberals find offensive. The campuses that used to pride themselves as zones of free expression are now the least free part of our society.

William F. Buckley wisely said that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the phone book than by Harvard's faculty. We're about to find out why.

On a tip from V the K. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.