A “True American?”

Sometimes it’s tough to tell who plays for America and who plays for … well, the other guys.

Take Mark Lloyd – the Federal Communications Commission “diversity czar” who has expressed starstruck support for Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, and yet utter contempt for the U.S. First Amendment.

Amazingly, Lloyd received a ringing endorsement this week from recently-appointed FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn.  Take a look at Clyburn sticking up for Lloyd  in this exclusive interview granted to Ashley Hester of FITS News …

As you can see in the video above, Clyburn was asked point blank if Lloyd’s support of the Chavez regime and his efforts to regulate media content here in America were “in keeping with the mission of the FCC or any other U.S. government agency for that matter.”

“I will say to you that I did not read whatever his alleged statement is,” Clyburn said in a somewhat rambling response, later hinting that Lloyd may have said some things “that might have been misinterpreted.”

“I know him to be a true American,” Clyburn said later in the interview. “I know him to be a lover of this country. I know him to be a committed employee. That’s the Mark Lloyd I know.”

Clearly, Clyburn doesn’t know Lloyd very well at all.

While Lloyd’s love of America is dubious at best, his love of the Chavez regime in Venezuela is boundless.

“In Venezuela, with Chavez, (it) is really an incredible revolution – a democratic revolution – to begin to put in place things that are going to have an impact on the people of Venezuela,” Lloyd said at a 2008 media conference.  “The property owners and the folks who then controlled the media in Venezuela rebelled – worked, frankly, with folks here in the U.S. government – worked to oust (Chavez). But he came back with another revolution, and then Chavez began to take very seriously the media in his country.”

Indeed he did begin to “take very seriously” the media, actually shutting down a network that disagreed with him.  Of course that was just one component of what Lloyd calls a “democratic” revolution that also saw the government seize private property and nationalize Venezuelan industry.

But it’s not just Lloyd’s support of Chavez that’s so disturbing – it is his radical views on the Fourth Estate here in America.

“My focus here is not freedom of speech or the press,” Lloyd writes in his 2006 book, Prologue to a Farce. “This freedom is all too often an exaggeration. At the very least, blind references to freedom of speech or the press serve as a distraction from the critical examination of other communications policies.”

Uh, no.  Freedom of speech and of the press is the only communications policy that matters.  Or at least that’s the way it should be.

Not to Lloyd, though.

“[T]he purpose of free speech is warped to protect global corporations and block rules that would promote democratic governance,” Lloyd writes later in his book.

Huh?  Say what?

The last time we checked, the purpose of free speech was to protect the democratic process from people who would seek to undermine it … people like Lloyd, quite frankly.

It gets worse, though.  According to Lloyd, the best way to deal with media outlets that don’t subscribe to the government’s views is to threaten them, harass them, sue them and … if necessary … take away their licenses.  He also supports forcing commercial owners who don’t tow the government line to pay fines and fee to support government broadcasting, basically replacing “dissenting” voices with government-sanctioned content.

Amazing, isn’t it?

And this guy works for the American government … your government … in a position that was created especially for him by the administration of  President Barack Obama.

But according to Mignon Clyburn, whose job it is to regulate the marketplace of ideas in this country, we shouldn’t worry because Lloyd is a “true American” who “loves his country.”

If that’s true, people, then this country is in serious, serious trouble …

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