There was a show-tune ditty that was popular back when I was a kid, which younger readers might also identify as the theme song to Married With Children. “Love and marriage,” went the lyric, “go together like a horse and carriage. This, I tell you, brother: You can’t have one without the other.” In quite the same way, in the context of electoral politics, you can’t have speech without money.

Only two words are necessary to say all that needs to be said about the rapidly expanding scandal over the dangerous food, toiletries, and manufactured goods arriving on our shores and shelves from The Peoples Republic of China: Silent Spring. That, of course, is the title of Rachel Carson’s 1962 classic book that launched the environmental movement by exposing the deleterious consequences of the over-use of the pesticide dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT).

The unwarranted uproar among the punditocracy over President Bush’s commutation of part of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s sentence is indicative of the sorry state of this nation’s public political discourse. The left is agitated because Bush spared Vice President Cheney’s right-hand man a humiliating prison sentence for lying in an investigation about his knowledge of the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity.