Conservative money, bad; Liberal money, fine

The editors of the New York Times are very worried about the tens of millions of dollars Sheldon Adelson is spending to unseat President Obama:

He is the perfect illustration of the squalid state of political money, spending sums greater than any political donation in history to advance his personal, ideological and financial agenda, which is wildly at odds with the nation’s needs.

I agree that billionaires spending tens of millions of dollars in elections deserve scrutiny about their motives, because what they want might differ from what regular Americans want and need. But I wish the New York Times and the rest of the media had felt this way back when the billionaires spending tens of millions of dollars to unseat the President were liberals targeting George W. Bush.

2004 giving chart


I did a Nexis search and found not a single Times editorial before the 2004 election and couldn’t find a single editorial mentioning George Soros, Steven Bing, Peter Lewis, or Herb Sandler — which is everyone who spent more than $10 million on 527 groups that election, and all of them gave 100% to pro-Democrat groups.

I wrote two years ago, from a Koch conference being protested by Soros-funded groups, on what I think is the mindset behind the disparity in coverage:

When Politico reporter Ken Vogel pointed out that Soros hosts similar “secret” confabs, CAP’s Fang responded on Twitter: “don’t you think there’s a very serious difference between donors who help the poor vs. donors who fund people to kill government, taxes on rich?”
In less than 140 characters, Fang had epitomized the myopic liberal view of money in politics: Conservative money is bad, and linked to greed, while liberal money is self-evidently philanthropic.

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