These days, columnist George Will is only consistently good on one issue—but it is an issue he understands thoroughly and with total clarity: the fact that campaign finance controls are restrictions on the freedom of political speech.
Here is another excellent column from Will on this subject, this time exposing the hypocrisy of the New York Times in the case of the infamous MoveOn ad. In defending this ad, the Times is seeking to exempt itself from the very campaign finance controls that it has so vigorously advocated.
"Sauce for the Times," George Will, Washington Post, September 26 In June, the Times was in high dudgeon—it knows no other degree of dudgeon—about the Supreme Court's refusal to affirm a far-reaching government power to suppress political speech. The court ruled that a small group of Wisconsin residents had been improperly refused the right to run an issue advocacy ad urging the state's two senators not to filibuster the president's judicial nominees….
Less than three months after the Times excoriated the court for weakening restrictions on issue ads, the paper made a huge and patently illegal contribution to
Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., defending the decision to run the ad, said: "If we're going to err, it's better to err on the side of more political dialogue.... Perhaps we did err in this case. If we did, we erred with the intent of giving greater voice to people." Bauer notes that Sulzberger might have used words from a Supreme Court decision: "In a debatable case, the tie is resolved in favor of protecting speech." And: "Where the First Amendment is implicated, the tie goes to the speaker, not the censor." So spoke Chief Justice John Roberts in the Wisconsin decision that Sulzberger's paper denounced because it would magnify the voices of, among other things, "wealthy corporations." The Times Co.'s 2006 revenue was $3.3 billion.
The Times' performance in this matter confirms an axiom: There can be unseemly exposure of mind as well as of body.
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