- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
I'd like to post something that's authoratatively informed to help resolve the issue. But I can't. I simply have not put the amount of effort into learning about the election to be able to get past the 'presumed innocent, want more investigation' stage.
But I would like to add a few comments from what I have seen.
A few blocks from Salon, Crispin gave a speech last week to the Commonwealth Club. I have to say my reaction to it was similar to Farhood's reaction to his book: I felt he talked a whole lot about the topic of the criticism of his assertions - but while expecting that to lead up to some summary of the facts supporting them, he suddenly announced his speech was over without 'the meat' being delivered, IMO.
He made various references and assertions, and his message was well structured around how republicans stole the election 'before, during and after the voting', and he made reference to some activities, but I never felt he supported much - as Farhood said, he seemed to assume the correctness of the allegations.
Now, there is smoke - and I'd like to see it investigated. Examples include his allegations of (IIRC) 'thousands' of activities including the calls to black voters telling them they'd be arrested if they voted with any unpaid child support or traffic tickets - he even referred to a specific team of paid republican operatives who travelled from state to state making these calls. But that's all the evidence for them.
Another is the problem with why republican districts had plenty of machines and short lines, democrats had few machines, long lines.
He offered many assertions on this too, such as there being thousands of machines left locked in storage that could have been used.
Crispin makes his case passionately - he puts his neck so far out that you want him not to be exaggerating. It reminds me of watching Nixon play all the cards about the American people having to be able to trust their president and such, raising the stakes to use all the goodwill of the office, making the price far higher if (and when, in his case) the truth shows otherwise.
In other words, Crispin isn't just making the case - he's laying it out in such a way, to appeal to anyone who cares about the integrity of our system, asserting so strongly that he's right and being falsely smeared, the the stakes greatly increased for all investigators of election wrongs if the truth is otherwise.
It's the sort of thing, if false, you might see the republicans put someone up to to discredit the whole side of the argument.
I'm not beginning to allege Crispin has done that.
I think too, though, that whatever the fact with the election being 'stolen', we should not lose site of the many other problems with our current system - including the issue of corporate donations playing such a large, corrupting role. I think we should ban corporate donations from the system, removing the laissez-faire late 19th century policy that corporations are legally people.
Crispin had a lot of other points and anecdotes that are interesting and should be further looked into.
Let's figure out a mechanism to do so - with the congressional investigations so broken now, and the media investigations so broken now, that'll take some effort (the Viet Nam 'hearings' with veterans John Kerry participated in come to mind) - and debunk any the moment we find they're false, as Farhood did with at least one.
Finally - it'd be nice of some people recorded some of these calls telling them the election is on another day, etc.
An actual tape might get some media exposure, and convince a lot of people that the problem is real.
