Sunday, July 31, 2005
Election Reform 2005 (Part 2)
Hat tip to Jesse at Loaded Mouth for linking to the latest Matt Taibbi article: "HIGHLY IRREGULAR: The Ohio election story is going to come back." Jesse notes that Taibbi "is finally convinced that something foul happened on November 2nd in Ohio."
Taibbi - who previously "had refused even to look at any of the news stories surrounding the Ohio vote" - reluctantly attended the July 21st forum hosted by Harper's Magazine held "in the basement of the Capitol building" in Washington D.C. entitled "What Happened In Ohio?" which included the following Congressional Democrats as panelists: John Conyers, Jr., Stephanie Tubbs Jones, and Sherrod Brown.
Taibbi writes of his former misgivings:
"[T]here is a part of me that did not want to be associated with any sore-loser hysteria of the political margins, and in particular with this story, the great conspiratorial Snuffleupagus of the defeated left."
But it wasn't just the as-left-as-you-can-get NY Press columnist who felt that way:
"The media, I knew, would dismiss the Ohio story in exactly the casually vicious manner described above—as hysteria, as the delusional work of professional conspiracy theorists, as the behavior of sore losers unable to accept George Bush's clear popular victory."
"That last part, incidentally, was the formulation most journalists used when picking their official excuse for ignoring the '04 Ohio story. Because Bush really did win the popular vote, they argued, there was no point in investigating a possible electoral fraud in Ohio, because no one had really been cheated out of office."
"That idea allowed the media simply sidestep the entire issue, and escape having to make a pronouncement about the legitimacy of the Ohio elections—something they seemed hell bent on avoiding."
But Taibbi learned a lot in that basement. It's too bad that more journalists didn't attend that meeting.
Taibbi plans on following up this column next week, now that he has awakened from his paranoid stupor.
"Here's the thing about Ohio. Until you really look at it, you won't understand its significance, which is this: the techniques used in this particular theft have the capacity to alter elections not by dozens or hundreds or even thousands of votes, but by tens of thousands."
"And if we ignore this now, we're putting proven methods for easily ripping off major elections in the hands of the same party that had no qualms whatsoever about lying its way into a war in Iraq. In the hands of a merely corrupt political party, a bad election or two would be no big deal. But these clowns we have in power now imagine themselves to be revolutionaries, and their psychology is a lot like that of the leadership of Enron, pre-meltdown—with each passing day that they get away with it, they become more convinced by a delusion of righteousness."
But as I wrote about in Part 1, when the fuck are the a list bloggers on the left side of the blogosphere going to wake the fuck up? (hopefully, some will on Wednesday, after the pre-results are confirmed for the Ohio special election that blogosphere favorite Paul Hackett is running in).
Thanks for finally joining the tin foil party, Matt Taibbi; there's plenty of room for more of you.
Aside from the voluminous Conyers Report (pdf file), another great source of info is the incredible work done the last nine months at Brad Blog. So if you're one of those Democrats who "had refused even to look at any of the news stories surrounding the Ohio vote" it's about freaking time you got with the program.
(Jesse, the infamous biofuel blogger, formerly of In Search For Telford and Republican Sinners, is now blogging at Loaded Mouth. Tas turned Loaded Mouth into a great group blog that includes Michael Hussey from Last Day of My Life, Kathy from Citizen's Rent, Worldmaker from Worldmaker.net, gonzo cartoonist Zencomix, along with Mark, Leslie, and Kryten42. A great blog has gotten even greater.)
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