Ballance In a Cramped Spot

Surely, I thought, Dana Milbank can't fit ballance into a column denouncing Karl Rove

"Stephen Colbert, Karl Rove and the mockery of campaign finance"

I am so naive

"The corporate cash tends to come from a small number of private businesses owned by extreme liberals or conservatives looking to elect like-minded candidates."

OK Dana name the extreme liberals. I think the standard for being an extreme liberal is to donate to Democrats. Maybe also to be denounced by Glenn Beck. I'm pretty sure he is thinking of George Soros who was an enthusiastic supporter of the most rapid possible transition towards capitalism in his native ex-Austro-Hungarian empire. Opposing Bush is enough to be a dangerous lefty if one is needed to achieve Ballance.

Also, I wonder where Milbank got his data -- the column mainly stresses that the donations are secret. He asserts that the cash "tends" to come from closely held businesses owned by individuals and not from publicly traded corporations. How does he know that ?

It is hard to criticize liberals in a column about how the Roberts court and Rove have decided that the rich should have more ability to influence elections. So Milbank criticizes some un named and, I assert, fiction extreme leftist billionaires.

The sad thing is that I'm sure Milbank considers this a hard hitting column in which he pulls not punches (for which he will have to pay with several sneer at both your houses columns). I'f fairly sure that the dig at imaginary "extreme liberals" was made half consciously. He knows that conservatives argue that George Soros is a powerful extremist (when they are not asserting that ACORN can steal elections). He knows that the accurate claim that billionaire political extremists are all right wing will be contested (progressive billionaires fight AIDS not the GOP). So he inserted a plainly false claim to avoid debate.

We can't have debate in the Post can we.