The 'vast' left wing

Published May 31, 2005

THE VAST LEFT WING CONSPIRACY

By Byron York

Crown, $26.95, 288 pages

When President George W. Bush broke a campaign promise in his first term and signed into law the ill begotten McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill he little guessed that he was opening a can of political worms that down the line would seriously threaten his bid for reelection.

McCain-Feingold, named after Republican senator John McCain of Arizona and Russell Feingold, Wisconsin Democrat, like all earlier campaign legislation, was supposed for all time to put an end to the big, bad, bogeyman of excessive campaign spending.

Of course it did nothing of the sort.

What Mr. McCain, Mr. Feingold and their supporters had never learned was that in a nation where free speech and a free press are guaranteed by the Constitution, smarter people than they are will find ways around any attempts to limit either.

Thus it was with McCain-Feingold, the law.

And the first people who found the way around were not rich Republicans; they were super-rich, far-left Democrats, including one of the world's richest men, the naturalized American from Hungary with the palindrome for a last name, George Soros.

Their story is related by National Review reporter Byron York in his book, "The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy," which is a takeoff on Hillary Clinton's famous charge that her husband was the victim of a "vast right wing conspiracy."

Neither, as Mr. York is quick to admit, was a conspiracy in the traditional sense of the term.

Not to worry,
McCain will take responsibility for opening the election faucet to Dems Billionaires with McCain Feingold.
Besides eliminating filibusters, except in cases of (think of a few additional reasons), should the second one of his initiatives also fail, McCain will remedy one or possibly both of his sour turned initiatives.
Who wants to carry two rings around the neck when going for President.

A couple of things:

1.
This sentence stuck with me:

Could it be that the supreme court OK'd McCain-Feingold because the justices (or at least the more intelligent justices) realized this, and, because they saw that the wording of that "ditzy" (I like that description) law didn't really lay a glove on the first amendment, decided it was better for its folly to play out in public than to overturn it, thereby encouraging politicians to pass a more dangerous law? Perhaps the justices knew that, over time, the foolishness of this law would become apparant for all to see, and that would inhibit future tinkering? Wishful thinking, perhaps.

2.
The real danger for Republicans and the right comes in our counter-measures. As Mr. Nofziger points out in the article, the left is just getting started in its effort to turn McCain-Feingold to its own advantage. The right, being smarter and more creative, will inevitably do a better job exploiting the opportunities created by this silly piece of legislation. Eventually, our side may do something that pushes the envelope a little too far, either in fact, or (more probably) in some way that can be spun into an illegality by the left and its willing accomplices in the MSM. This is the sort of disaster the left is incredibly good at creating; it is, after all, what they used to get Nixon and (to a lesser extent) Ronaldus Maximus in his second term.

(steely)

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.