First, they came for the shock jocks...

Last week, during the height of the Don Imus news cycle, Rush Limbaugh went on the air to warn his listeners that "they" would be going after him next. Who? Why, the liberals, of course. Limbaugh seems convinced that The Liberals are going to use Imus' downfall as an opening to go at him again over his making fun of Michael J. Fox last November.

And Salon reports that many of the conservative movement's most prominent figures are joining Limbaugh in playing the victimization card over the Imus firings.

First they came for Don Imus. And now they'll come for Rush.

At least, that was the fear at the Free Congress Foundation on April 13, where a panel discussion of an ancient broadcasting regulation quickly turned into a discussion of Don Imus and how his firing might portend a similar fate for some of the right's best-known media personalities. In the absence of any compelling evidence, participants in the latest of the conservative think tank's occasional Next Conservatism Forum series managed to convince themselves that the Fairness Doctrine, a rule that was scrapped by the Federal Communications Commission 20 years ago, was poised for a comeback, and was about to become a weapon in a liberal jihad against the right wing's freedom of speech.

In fact, the prominent conservatives, addressing a crowd of 30 on the ground floor of a Washington row house, described what sounded like a conspiracy. Panelist Ken Blackwell, formerly Ohio's secretary of state and the Republican candidate for governor last fall, said Imus was "not a conservative" and that "the left has sacrificed one of their own to give them a platform to go after true conservative talk show hosts." Cliff Kincaid, of the conservative media watchdog Accuracy in Media, said the Imus firing had been a revelation. "It wasn't exactly clear to me how [liberals] intended to bring back the Fairness Doctrine, but I think now with the Imus affair, we know ... [And it's a] short leap from firing Imus to going after Rush Limbaugh."

For people who claim to believe in rugged, boot-strapping individualism, conservatives sure do spend an awful lot of time whining about how The Man is keeping them down.

This liberal-led purge of conservative talkers is as much a fantasy as the "liberal media" that they have been howling about for the past 20 years.

Don Imus was fired by two corporate media entities that decided it was more expensive to keep him than it was to get rid of him. Period. It was not until advertisers began to abandon his TV and radio vehicles that his employers took any real action against him. That initial two-week suspension was a joke.

If the government had shut Imus down over his remarks, I would be the first one on the protest line. That is not what happened. The marketplace that rewarded Imus so handsomely for so many years simply decided to stop doing so. They no longer wanted to buy what he was selling.

What happened to Imus was the free market in action, which is what conservatives say they believe in. Of course, as with so many of the things they claim to believe in, they only believe in it until it threatens to cost them something.

Relax, Rush. Your job is safe as long as you keep your corporate masters happy. Just keep convincing your listeners that global warming is fake, and that Iraq's WMDs were real. You'll be fine.