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FEC to Ginsberg:
You Must (Ha, Ha) Be Kidding
by Dave "Doctor" Gonzo

Tuesday, April 18, 2000 -- New York (AmpolNS) -- Score one for the little guys!

A webmaster whose parody "Bush campaign" site drew a retaliatory complaint to the Federal Election Commission won his battle in front of the FEC.

Early last year, Zack Exley built and published gwbush.com, an hilarious parody of Bush's pathetic campaign site. It didn't take long for Bush's backers to notice -- and attempt to go for Exley's jugular.

Bush himself commented on the site with an unforgettable comment: "There ought to be limits to freedom."

A lawyer from the Bush campaign, Ben Ginsburg, leveled a complaint with the FEC, claiming that Exley was engaged in campaigning and therefore should "comply with relevant election laws" by both posting a disclaimer identifying the site's origin and filing with the FEC as a political action committee, disclosing the amount of money spent on the site.

You may recall the name Ben Ginsburg if you were glued to the cable news tube during that Lewinsky thing. Ginsburg, whose lascivious leer had more than a number of viewers believing he was getting some kind of kinky jollies talking about Clinton's so-called "crimes" -- was a stealth spokesman for Ken Starr as a frequent panelist on various MSNBC programs, usually teamed up with fellow hard-righters and a moderate-at-best "defending" the Clinton Administration.

Ginsberg's move against the gwbush.com was accurately seen by the Internet community -- and even a couple people in big-media-controlled press organs -- as an attempt to intimidate Exley and other web enthusiasts considering creating their own sites critical of Bush.

But it was also a crude miscalculation -- providing yet more raw material for a site that had raised questions about Bush's alleged narcotics use, boozing, womanizing, seeming love of the death penalty, and continuing support of long-term imprisonment of minor offenders. Exley used Ginsberg's own complaint as a vehicle to not only expose the Bush Campaign's coercive, strong-arm tactics to shut down his site but Team Shrub's overall ignorance of the realities of the Internet.

Federal regulators dismissed Ginsberg's complaint last Friday, saying that it was too low a priority to warrant the use of the commission's resources.

An investigator for the commission wrote in his summary that "[t]here is no evidence of serious intent to violate the FECA [Federal Election Campaign Act], and this matter is less significant relative to other matter pending before the Commission."

Some analysts claim that the FEC's decision leaves up in the air the issue of whether advocacy of a candidate on the Web, whether negative or positive, is subject to government regulation.

We think that the FEC left nothing up in the air -- after all, it costs next to nothing to put up a web site these days, and the FEC knows better than to walk into a legal minefield where first amendment considerations are enormous and "campaign finance" issues are practically nonexistent. They know better than to invite a situation that will tie up the FEC, courts, and -- yes -- campaign officials, all of whom have more important things to deal with.

In reaction to the FEC ruling, Bush campaign spokesman cott McClellan said, "We just hope people will use good judgment and common sense....If you look at all the Web sites, you'll see that free speech is alive and well in America, and Governor Bush has a very thick skin."

Right, Scott -- alive despite the Bush campaign's strong-arm tactics. And Bush has a thick skin? If that's the case, why the filing against Exley?

You just have to laugh at the Bush campaign's yearlong losing record in the Internet arena. It's obvious the FEC did -- laughing Bush's superfluous complaint out of Washington.