Legal Question for You Lawyers Out There

[trinityvixen]

I read this today:Bush Campaign's Top Outside Lawyer Resigns

Granted, Kerry's got a lawyer working with a group that is doing 'get out the vote' drives, but isn't this illegal? I thought that the 527s had to operate entirely separately from candidate's campaigns. If they're sharing a lawyer, isn't that coordinating in an extent? According to the article, no, since lawyers are deemed 'not strategists.' Who the hell does that law thinks it's kidding? Lawyers are excellent strategists. It's basically what they do for a living...

Comments

[wellgull.livejournal.com]

And of course...

1. people have to go to Bush's Crawford ranch to deliver a protest letter, because the President is never actually in the White House, since he's still always on vacation.

2. Bush is using this to call for an end to free speech for all 527 groups -- which happens to include our friends who are fighting the good fight and saving democracy.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I don't have a problem with the 527s, though I must admit they are being abused. I think there should be no problem with people running ads to endorse candidates they support, so long as the facts are there. However, on both sides, the 527s are tip-toeing around the law and coming awful close to violating the only thing that keeps them from being bottomlessly funded channels of partisan support--the fact that they are not allowed to coordinate with the candidates' campaigns. This is too loosely defined. We need to say one way or another, you can work for one but not the other, and there should be a grace period after leaving one to join the other, especially in the campaign-to-527 direction, where it looks worst and can be most damaging if revealed to be coordinated, as Bush is finding out.

Kerry's not immune; read the article and see how the Dems abuse it, too, but as far as I know, the Swift Boat guys are the worst because they are out-right lying. My uncle was in Vietnam. He can't watch war movies without his support group, and he's one of the more functional ones. Imagine going through that hell and then having some draft-dodging fucker get his friends to buy a few guys to say you didn't do shit there and didn't deserve the accolades you got for saving lives in the face of danger. That's what bothers me. Kerry smiled it off when Jon Stewart asked him on the Daily Show, but man, I'd be hurting if that were me. What next? We gonna knock down any veteran of Bush's war on Iraq because they were brave but went to war for an idiot president? GRRRR.

[arcane-the-sage.livejournal.com]

Actually I will go as far to say the in no way are the swift boat guys bought by Bush (though they are being supported by Bush's allies). The reason the swift boat guys are outright lying about Kerry has been made perfectly clear, they hate Kerry for his testimony in front of congress when he got back from Vietnam. Most of the swift boat guys (and esp the guy who first put it together) have said publicly that the reason they're going after Kerry is because of the testimony. For them this is one big revenge game that others are more than happy to fund since it attacks Kerry.

[wellgull.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm not saying Kerry's immune either. I would not be in the least surprised to learn that MoveOn and other groups are just a hush-hush part of the Democratic Party, though they occasionally make somewhat more radical gestures than the Party has the balls to do publicly. It's a big political machine, basically; one created by two mutually insupportable and widely recognized facts: nobody can win an election in a television-saturated era without megabucks, but there's too much money (and corrupting money) in politics.
And that's why campaign finance reform is doomed.

But yeah. The machine is the machine; it's been like that for at least the last hundred years (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington says that much). The problem is the same now as it was then: truth is strangled and lies set up in its place. That's the worst thing about the Swifties, and the worst thing about Fox, and the worst thing about, well... all of it...

ps, more anger fodder: on Bush's astroturfing...