Suddenly The Media Thinks The 527's Are Bad?

8-30-2004

You know, the thing that’s so amazing about politics, especially in America because we are so free and it’s so indelibly entrenched into our society, is that the dynamics of the system resists any alteration of it’s mechanics.

Such is the case with the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law that was intended to keep the alleged politically corrupting money out of politics. The problem with this has always been that money equates free speech.

A good example would be the media in most forms. How many poor people own a newspaper, magazine, or television station? I’ll guarantee they would never allow an impediment of their revenue collections based on political motivation and they work harder than anyone to effect political discourse in this country. Exceptions to this are AM talk radio and the internet, where Mom and Pop stations and average individuals work diligently with little or no funding to fight for free speech and their right to be heard, yet are attacked vehemently by political partisans for that very reason.

McCain-Feingold did follow it’s basic tenet and has limited individual contributions to political campaigns to $2000 per person, but the reputed corrupting river of cash simply circumvented the dam and the excess found other channels through which to flow.

Yet the limit on campaign contributions didn’t hurt President Bush’s campaign coffers. Why? Because; this is something the unbiased mainstream media will never admit even though they suppress information like this everyday, the majority of contributions to his campaign and almost every Republican campaign past and present, are in amounts of $50 or less from average everyday Americans. Preventing enormous donations from rich individuals or large organizations only hindered Democrat campaigns.

What the campaign finance law did do was open the flood gates for activist groups to accept any amount of private, i.e. corrupting, money from any person or group to be used to demolish a candidate without restrictions or mandates of propriety.

Before the passage of McCain-Feingold and up until recently, the mainstream press lauded the veritable ingeniousness of this collaboration, mostly because it gave the media even more power to control the dissemination of information to the American electorate.

Then without warning...without an advance alarm blaring to alert the mainstream press and their willing accomplices on the political left of possible devastation ahead, the flood waters broke the levee and began to trickle to the right of the dam.

Even though stream after stream of cash was fingering off to the left and channeling large quantities of supernatant from this theoretically corrupted money to several legally acceptable political activist groups created under the auspices of the McCain-Feingold law called 527's, political pundits in the press saw not a words problem with these groups’ tactics.

Some media outlets even went so far as to champion the heinous, mendacious bile directed at President Bush and his administration that was and still is being produced by these groups with the more than $100 million that has been contributed in the name of electing John Kerry President of the United States. Not to mention the Hollywood liberals who have been and continue to use their media connections to produce more attacks on Republicans and the president. It was even promoted by the press that a possible conflict with advertising Michael Moore’s Bush-bashing film and the campaign law was somehow a Bush attack on the freedom of speech.

Then came the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth cruising up the river as they learned more and more about the Democrat presidential nominee and his version of his four months of active service in Vietnam and then presented that to the American people as the main reason why he was better suited than President Bush to be Commander-In-Chief.

Using, by today’s standard, a mediocre donation from a Republican real estate magnate from Texas, this group of more than 250 highly decorated Vietnam veterans embarked on a mission of informing the American populace about their eye-witness accounts of events as they remember them transpiring in Vietnam concerning John Kerry that are contradictory to Kerry’s versions.

Suddenly Democrats and their media allies are aghast and beside themselves with vitriol towards this 527 group of veterans. They started accusing the president of being behind the charges and have clamored repeatedly about the Bush campaign lawyer who also gave the veterans advice and subsequently stepped down from the Bush campaign to avoid any misconception of impropriety. Mainstream media has yet to excoriate Kerry and his many connections to any 527 group.

Why weren’t the members of the press concerned about ‘the current state of politics in America’ for the last eighteen months when these 527's were spending millions of dollars on ads vilifying the president, oftentimes without any credible evidence to support their charges? Why did these members of the press appear openly hostile towards the president in nationally televised question and answer sessions where they bombarded him with these same baseless indictments? Why hasn’t John Kerry been treated this way by members of the press?

No, the media just wants to shut down the Swift Boat Veterans. Why? Because they have done more damage to Kerry with a few hundred thousand dollars than all the other 527's have done to President Bush while spending millions attacking him.

The best part of all to come out of this, is that the media has now been forced to show the true liberal nature they’ve tried to keep hidden all these years. How many more of us will they now try to silence?

Lee P Butler