The "banned" pro-GOP videos are beginning to pile up, and I'm starting to smell a rat.

Let's see: After Michelle Malkin managed to get a Muslim-bashing video removed by YouTube, we had an ad made by David Zucker (of Airplane! plane) that was kept off the airwaves by GOP strategists (or so Matt Drudge told us) and then (allegedly) declared "adults only" by YouTube (even though it's right here, available to everyone). And now we have Move America Forward protesting that Fox has censored a Clinton-bashing ad.

The Malkin incident seems to have been legit (even though her video is back up at YouTube), but now I think these guys are trying to be the victims of censorship, in order to make the point that The Force Of Evil Will Stop At Nothing To Defeat The GOP -- and if no one will censor these right-wing ads, well, right-wingers will (reportedly) do the censoring themselves.

Oh and there's another element to this. The link I gave you for the Move America Forward story was to a Free Republic thread. It leads you to MAF's Web site -- which immediately asks for money. The thread was posted by "WND" and contains a huge notice pointing out that the complete story is at WorldNetDaily.com. And the Freep thread itself contains a fund-raising ad for Free Republic. Everyone's trying to make money off this alleged outrage.

Fox, too, I'm sure. Fox probably wants to pretend to be "fair and balanced" again when it's quite possible we'll have a Democratic House, and maybe Senate, come January; also, Rupert Murdoch, like all right-wingers (and absolutely no one else), probably thinks Hillary Clinton will be the next president of the United States. But that's clearly not all that's going on. Right-wingers are reading about "the viral video revolution" and the huge sale of YouTube to Google and concluding that the slickest way to draw eyeballs to one's message is to put it in a "banned" ad. I think this is a miscalculation, but hey, they're kinda desperate these days.