Fantasies at the WSJ
by kos
Tue Sep 25, 2007 at 09:05:13 AM PDT
No one has ever accused the Wall Street Journal editorial board of being "reality based".
In a staff editorial, the paper's editorial board writes:
DailyKos holds forth regularly that "our democracy is in danger" from money in politics and loudly supports McCain-Feingold and other campaign and media restrictions. The New York Times position on campaign finance reform is that it "has not gone far enough," and that more should be done to control donors and prevent changes that would "open the spigots to corporate and special-interest money."
Huh? There probably hasn't been a harsher critic of the campaign finance "reformer" groups on the Left than me. In fact, when you run pieces titled "Time to revisit CFR" and "Stop tinkering with a broken CFR system. Scratch it and start over", you kind of get the hint that I might be a bit hostile to the current campaign finance regime.
To quote from those pieces:
The current system holds all money to be evil, and firewalls are enacted to keep said money from entering the political system. The problem is that speech costs money (how much did protest attendees pay this past weekend to get to DC? Airfare and gas aren't free), and in a world in which more and more people demand a voice in their politics, money will always find a way into the system. So more firewalls are added, and more loopholes are discovered, and it becomes a running battle between those trying to eliminate money in politics, and the demands of those who want their First Amendment rights to be heard.
Or, pointing out the absurdities of the current system:
While testifying at the FEC fighting for a blogger media exemption (which we won), I sat next to Larry Noble, then-head of the Center for Responsive Politics, who was doing his best to destroy internet free speech (along with the likes of Carol Darr).
During his testimony, he was sidetracked to make the most ridiculous argument I'd ever heard -- that state parties that featured images of federal candidates on their websites would have to calculate and account for those pictures. The example he used was the Arizona Republican Party. If their website featured a picture of John McCain, the party would have to calculate the percentage of the screen real estate taken by John McCain and account that as a federal expenditure.
Not only was the demand technically impossible (just think of how screen resolutions and font sizes affect how a screen looks), but it was ridiculous on common-sense grounds. Why shouldn't the Arizona Republican Party (or any other) be able to put up a picture of their entire slate, top to bottom, without the government trying to make it difficult to do so. [Update: Adam B found the transcript of the exchange.]
Not that any of this matters. The wingnuts at the Wall Street Journal editorial decided to take a cheap shot without bothering to check if, indeed, it aligned with reality. What's worse, the WSJ directly quoted the site as saying something none of those speaking for it has said. I'd charge journalistic malfeasance, but those propagandists have nothing to do with "journalism" .
Not that we'd expect any different from that bunch.
- ::
Permalink | 112 comments