Do as I suggest, not as I claim to eschew.
Those wascally Wepublicans and their corporate-financed efforts to compel voter turnout, Rachel Maddow complained on her MSNBC show Tuesday, before suggesting possible Chinese or Brazilian manipulation of American elections through legalized bribes to unpatriotic conservatives (video after page break) --
MADDOW: That stuff, that organizational capacity, will now be handled through means that can be 100 percent corporate funded to an unlimited degree. If FreedomWorks is now going to be doing the get-out-the-vote efforts for Republican candidates, who are the donors to FreedomWorks? Really, who are their donors? You don't know, I don't know, they don't have to tell us.
If China or Brazil decides that they like one of the Republican presidential contenders this year, and they would prefer that person to Barack Obama, what's to stop China or Brazil from giving a million bucks to FreedomWorks to go get out the vote, to go do organizational work for that candidate? What's to stop them from giving a $1 million donation? Or a $10 million donation? Or a $10 billion donation? Literally, what is to stop China from writing a $10 billion check to elect some favored Republican candidate in the next election, to elect some favored Republican candidate the next president of the United States? What's to stop that now?
Later in the same show, however, Maddow appeared considerably less worried about the propriety of such practices when she said this to former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean --
Do Democrats at this point see their challenge as finding their own billionaires who they like better? Or do Democrats have a qualitatively different challenge here? I mean, is there a way to compete with this other than fire with fire?
"Their own billionaires" -- provided they aren't from China or Brazil. (Not to worry, George Soros)
