James Taranto, responding to a press release from Common Cause (whose followers we recently heard here):

[…] the formerly mainstream media have spent the past two years trying to depict the Tea Party as precisely the sort of racist, hateful, violent political movement that Common Cause appears in the video to be. That media effort has failed, not for lack of will but for lack of evidence. If everybody did it, the Tea Party would do it, and if the Tea Party did it, you would have read about it in the New York Times.

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.”

[…]

It seems clear that the people who wrote and approved this press release–who are anonymous except for Mary Boyle, vice president for communications, who is listed as “contact”–also live in a rather special world. They are basing their generalities about “anyone who has ever attended a public event” and “every political gathering” on their own experience.

That is to say, the monstrousness seen at the Common Cause rally is within the typical range of behavior at the sort of political gatherings that Common Cause executives attend. That is much more damning of the left than the Common Cause rally taken in isolation.

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.

(As an aside, if the guys at Common Cause think Citizens United is inexplicable, perhaps they failed to read the court’s carefully reasoned 57-page opinion. It was written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, whom Common Cause “inexplicably” does not target in its hate campaign.)

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.

So here we have a corporation that advertises itself as a “grassroots organization” while exercising its First Amendment rights to advance the position that corporations do not have First Amendment rights, only individuals do. Some individuals, participating in the corporation’s “grassroots” rally, exercise their First Amendment rights in ways that harm the corporation’s image. The corporation responds by exercising its First Amendment rights to denounce those individuals for having exercised their First Amendment rights. And it does so in its capacity as a faceless corporation, by issuing a statement for which no individual–not even CEO Bob Edgar–takes responsibility.

For the sake of truth in advertising, Common Cause should change its name to Hypocrisy Hub.

Reached for comment, Common Cause issued the following statement: “I know you are but what am I? SOMEBODY GO FETCH A ROPE!”

(h/t geoffb)