After 9/11, conservatives repeatedly attacked dissent against President Bush as treasonous. Now one center-left commentator is taking a similar approach.

In a Friday column criticizing the administration’s offensive against Fox News, Time’s Joe Klein suggested that some Fox News content “borders on sedition” and consists of “seditious lies”:

Let me be precise here: Fox News peddles a fair amount of hateful crap. Some of it borders on sedition. Much of it is flat out untrue.

But I don’t understand why the White House would give such poisonous helium balloons as Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity the opportunity for still greater spasms of self-inflation by declaring war on Fox.

If the problem is that stories bloated far beyond their actual importance–ACORN’s corruption, Van Jones’s radical past–are in danger of leaching out of the Fox hothouse into the general media, then perhaps the Administration should be a bit more diligent about whom it hires and whom it funds.

If the problem is broader–that Fox News spreads seditious lies to its demographic sliver of an audience–the Administration should probably be stoic: the wingnuts will always be with us.

This is the worst attack on dissent by a pro-Obama commentator that I’ve seen since he took office. Fox’s coverage of the White House is frequently unfair and misleading, but that doesn’t constitute sedition (Merriam-Webster’s: “incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority”).