Well, I agree with you about "shoal." If that word's tertiary meaning ("a large amount") had been as effective as Hitchens intended, he wouldn't have felt it necessary to add the redundant modifier "huge." That's being arch for archness' sake -- typical of a certain kind of British schoolboy rhetoric and the vulgar-Anglophile American who admires it.

I disagree, however, with the notion of campaign finance reform as "treason." It's no limitation on anyone's claim to freedom to put limits on the extent to which any one candidate for high office will be beholden to any one contributor. Nothing prevents an individual from starting their own political or media organization financed with their own money. The 527 rule is being exploited by various groups with private money to put across specific points of view on various issues.

It certainly would be, however, a very great restriction on the people's political freedom to allow the public space -- which in our day of communications technologies is reducible to media broadcast and publishing capability, a tangible, finite resource - to be bought up and controlled by a tiny circle of wealthy insiders. Concern for "freedom" absolutely excludes any supposed (and oxymoronic) "freedom to dominate" social discourse, to crowd out less profitable points of view by means of an imposed market censorship -- freedom and domination being mutually exclusive concepts!