One Last Post About That Racist And Violent Common Cause Rally

Via Insty.

If you can handle one more posting about The Common Cause rally, this should be it. Unless something really good comes along.

James Taranto points out a few things he noticed in the Wall Street Journal:

The press release is framed as a condemnation of the Common Cause supporters--or, in the group's unwieldy description of them, "a few of those attending the events around a gathering Common Cause helped to organize Sunday near Palm Springs." The statement goes on:

Anyone who has attended a public event has encountered people whose ideas or acts misrepresented, even embarrassed, the gathering. Every sporting event has its share of "fans" whose boorish behavior on the sidelines makes a mockery of good sportsmanship; every political gathering has a crude sign-painter or epithet-spewing heckler.
Everybody does it? Think it through and you will see that this is a stunning indictment of the American left.

[. . .]
In claiming that everybody does it, Common Cause is committing the fallacy known as hasty generalization: drawing an overbroad conclusion based on a statistically insufficient sample. A famous example from politics is the apocryphal quote attributed to the late Pauline Kael, film critic of The New Yorker: "I don't understand how Nixon won. Everybody I know voted for McGovern."
[. . .]
There is another rich irony to Common Cause's "condemnation" of its rally's participants. The purpose of the event was "to call public attention to the political power of . . . corporations, their focus on expanding that power, and the dangers it presents to our democracy." Common Cause is targeting Justices Scalia and Thomas because they voted with the majority in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the 2010 decision that--as Common Cause put it in a fund-raising appeal last year--"inexplicably gave corporations the same rights as individuals" to engage in political speech.
[. . .]
Common Cause's position is that only individuals, not corporations, have the right to free speech. So what is Common Cause? As we noted above, its website describes it as a "grassroots organization." But that term has no legal meaning. As Common Cause's "Frequently Asked Questions" explains, the group is a "a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, tax exempt organization." A corporation, just like Citizens United.
[. . .]
For the sake of truth in advertising, Common Cause should change its name to Hypocrisy Hub.

Please read the whole thing.