The American Spectator

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In the New York Times’s view, it’s all payback for the Bush tax cuts and — horrors! — bound to create new pressure for still further tax cuts. If the Times’ choice of words is any indication, the paper is in full Bolshevik mode: “record-breaking binge of Republican money-raising … the extraordinary gilded age of fat-cat politicking that has befallen the nation … the G.O.P.’s perennial postmortem piñata for the rich … the [Republican] party’s dedication to the serial detaxation of upper-bracket Americans.” That’s one way to look at it, but names will never hurt the GOP. Democrats need to come up with the sticks and stones instead.

Twice on PBS’s “NewsHour” last Friday, Democratic pundit Mark Shields showed his displeasure at the Republicans’ decided hard-money advantage in the wake of soft-money’s demise by calling it “short-term.” But why short-term instead of permanent? He didn’t explain, though he seemed to know something those less enlightened do not.

But of course: a letter in Saturday’s N.Y. Times from the executive director of something calling itself “Public Campaign” in Washington denounced the $2,000 individual checks going to President Bush’s re-election as “not representative of the American public.” (Isn’t that what the complaint against soft money was all about?) But, our executive director let on, “If we strengthened our public financing system for the presidential election…” That’s it in a nut shell. If, having eliminated soft money, Democrats can’t compete on the hard side, well then, they’ll just have to make sure the government runs all campaigns. Welcome to the next great campaign finance reform cause. Who better to run it than the party of government and thus by definition more representative of the American public than it anyone thought possible.

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p> Missing the Connection (posted 6/23/03 1:10 a.m.) br> All is not quiet on the other anti-Bush front either. Lucianne.com has already amply ridiculed Walter Pincus ‘s Washington Post “thumbsucker,” “Report Cast Doubt on Iraq- Al Qaeda Connection.” There was some evidence, yes, but just not as clear as President Bush claimed it was. Nitpicking by the usual nitwits, sounds like. Here’s my favorite paragraph: /p>

The president said some al Qaeda leaders had fled Afghanistan to Iraq and referred to one “very senior al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year.” It was a reference to Abu Mussab Zarqawi, a Jordanian. U.S. intelligence already had concluded that Zarqawi was not an al Qaeda member but the leader of an unaffiliated terrorist group who occasionally associated with al Qaeda adherents, the sources said.