ryan.freebern.org

It disappoints me that Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, a man whom I usually hold in fairly high regard, would link to something as misleading and disingenuous as this post which compares the earnings of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (SBVT) with the top Democratic 527s, and concludes that John Kerry has tens of millions of dollars more 527 support than Bush.

The author of the post gets his data from OpenSecrets.org, which attempts to keep track of data on money in politics, including the funds raised by all the 527 groups. Looking at their page on the major 527 players, it’s simple to see that the number of 527s supporting Democrats is just about even with the number supporting Republicans.

Furthermore, the post implies that because Kerry says SBVT is doing Bush’s “dirty work,” that means all 527s do dirty work, so Kerry accepting assistance from 527s is hypocritical. This line of logic is quite obviously flawed. The SBVT, Kerry contends, are doing “dirty work” because the ad they’re running and the points they’re making have largely been proven to be lies, often through corollation with previous statements by the veterans themselves and Navy records. The ads run by MoveOn.org, though, are based on easily verifiable fact. That’s not dirty — it’s providing truth to the public.

And to left-leaning journalists and bloggers: when Bush says he “condemn[s] these activities of the 527s,” he’s not “calling for a halt to Swift Boat veterans’ ads.” He’s calling for a halt to all ads by 527 groups. Spin is ugly, whichever way it goes.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, Aug 24, 2004 at 11:54 am and is tagged culture, media, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.