Sir Xsarus wrote:
From your original Post you said the guy was decrying the fact that money has too large an influence in media. According to you, he was not specifically targeting anyone, but complaining about the situation that has been created by this ruling and past ones in the same vein. So now you're shifting what the person was complaining about to something other than what you presented, and declaring that is why you find it hypocritical.
I thought the comment about how this was "1 minute after saying how important it is to make sure to elect a Democrat to the White House in 2016 so that more progressive justices could be appointed to the Supreme Court", indicated how his opposition was to conservative speech, but you are correct that I didn't explicitly state this. Um... He did basically go on a diatribe about how this was unfair to liberals, and how conservatives were destroying the nation, etc, etc, etc. At one point, he actually said that it was strange that we spent so much time hunting terrorists abroad when we've got 5 of them on the Supreme Court.
Just making sure we're clear how hard core anti-conservative he was. This was not an intellectual discussion about how funded speech should be in an ideal world. It was more like "We can't allow those darn conservatives to spend money influencing people's opinions!!!"
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Based on your post it seems to me that fits the example given above, given that if money in politics were more controlled it would affect everyone equally.
Sure. Again though, he wandered well past the actual issue (individuals being able to donate to as many campaigns as they want) to a more broad "money isn't speech and shouldn't be allowed to be used to influence political outcomes", right after he just used a platform paid for with money to ask people to vote a particular way in the next presidential election so as to obtain a very specific political outcome. That's where the hypocrisy came from.
It was really more the lack of recognition that his own speech was paid for in precisely the same way as that he was railing against. And he either didn't realize this, or he was banking on his audience not realizing it. I guess what I'm getting at is that he clearly wasn't actually opposed to funded political speech, but using the issue to spin up anti-conservative sentiment.