Campaign Finance Farce

The NY Times is up to its old editorial legerdemain-advocating campaign finance reform while supporting candidates that abuse it with impunity. In yesterday's paper, we read the following plea to Mayor Bloomberg to abide by a finance law that everyone knows he has absolutely no intention of adhering to: "After two elections in which he campaigned with more than $150 million of his own money, this time he should comply with New York City’s excellent campaign finance system, which would limit the amount he could spend on his third campaign."

Give us a break! If the Times genuinely felt that this was an overriding and compelling issue, it should have made it so before agreeing to support the mayor's bid to overturn the term limits law. Now the paper just appears to lack any real seriousness; and does anyone think, should the mayor run and spend like a drunken sailor, that the Times won't line up behind him alongside the rest of the billionaire press corps?

Principles should matter, but the Times adheres to them only when it is politically expedient. Did the Obama campaign's trashing of the public finance system cause the paper's enthusiasm for the Democrat to dampen? And did the paper say anything about the questionable online money grabbing that disabled any real credit card prevention?

If it did, we missed it. Imagine if that had been done by a Republican; all of the Times would have gone into a journalistic jihad. Hard to take folks like these seriously when they pontificate in such a skewed, and partisan fashion.