So, the other day on her local St. Louis radio talk show, our own Dana Loesch said the kind of thing that just a few years ago was celebrated by the mainstream media as the perfect example of “brave and edgy dissent” — “the highest form of patriotism,” and “the kind of free speech our men and women in uniform are fighting for!”

Then Barack Obama became president.

The real mistake Dana made, however, was two-fold. First, she forgot that she’s a conservative and second, she forgot that dissent is only applauded and defended in MSM circles when you defame the troops, not defend them.

Here’s what Dana said:

“Now we have a bunch of progressives that are talking smack about our military because there were marines caught urinating on corpses, Taliban corpses. Can someone explain to me if there’s supposed to be a scandal that someone pees on the corpse of a Taliban fighter? Someone who, as part of an organization, murdered over 3,000 Americans? I’d drop trou and do it too. That’s me though. I want a million cool points for these guys. Is that harsh to say? Come on people, this is a war. What do people think this is?”

As a response, a number of left-wing media outlets, most notably Politico, have drummed up more phony indignation than they’ve ever been able to summon against anything the monstrous Taliban have done to our troops or to innocent Afghans.

Here’s Politico’s Dylan Byers doing his passive-aggressive best to pretend that what Dana said is some kind of scandal or story and get her fired at CNN:

CNN hired Loesch, a co-founder of the St. Louis Tea Party Coalition, to join the “Best Political Team on Television” in February of last year. “I’m excited to be working with CNN and am appreciative of their efforts to showcase diverse political thought on their airwaves,” Loesch said at the time. “I look forward to the discussions.”

CNN, which has looked to bring in voices from across the political spectrum, also prides itself on being positioned in the center of the more ideologically driven Fox and MSNBC networks.

But here is where Byers reveals his true agenda:

I’ve reached out to CNN to ask for their response to Loesch’s comments, and whether or not it will have any impact on her role at CNN.

The emphasis there is mine but the subtext is all Byers, and how painfully obvious that subtext is. Byers is pushing to have Dana taken off the air or punished. But his true agenda is something bigger than that. What Byers and Politico really want is for Dana to be marginalized and her conservative voice silenced. This is obvious for two reasons. First off, what Dana said is completely defensible (especially in an era where Bill Maher, Whoopi Goldberg, and Michael Moore are cherished as MSM talking heads), and secondly, I know the Media Matters/Color of Change playbook when I see it.

The playbook is simple. Leftist outlets like Politico look for (or in this case, receive a tip from a leftist blogger notoriously obsessed with silencing Dana) any little thing a conservative says that can be amplified into the news cycle as unacceptable or outrageous. Then, this ginned-up tempest in a teapot is used as a wedge between the conservative and the outlet that dares allow that conservative’s voice to be heard.

Sure, once in a while even Politico has to acknowledge some of what’s fundamentally wrong with Media Matters, but they share much of the same political agenda and, in this case at least, the same methods.

That is why Byers turns a story about what Dana said on a St. Louis radio station into — you guessed it — a CNN story! Byers intentionally drags CNN into a story that had nothing to do with them and then asks a question that is really a rhetorical one: “…whether or not it will have any impact on her role at CNN.”  The message is clear: this must raise questions about her role at the network.

This is the leftist playbook that’s been used to silence the right for years now. This is what the George Soros-funded Media Matters does. This is what Van Jones’s Color of Change does. And now Politico has joined their ideological brethren in using the exact same tactic to silence Dana Loesch.

And don’t think for a second that this isn’t also some form of payback. Dana is the editor-in-chief of this site, a site that relentlessly exposes Politico’s biases, falsehoods, and scandals. Moreover, because of Politico’s ongoing and increasing credibility problems, Politico’s traffic is plummeting, and this nothingburger Byers summoned from fairy dust only proves that Politico is looking to take down with them anyone who dares hold them accountable.