Here's why I don't trust (or care about) the Leftist whining (a year later no less) about Bush stealing the white house: we should've won by a blow out: here we have the most incompetent elected official (not just President, but any elected official anywhere) in my lifetime (I'm 42), and the best the left could do was John Kerry - a war supporter himself, and let's say Bush squeaked by by cheating - well, good for him - we're such losers that we deserve the dog house, not the white house... and now the whinging losers are whining that the winner cheated - like little fucking children in the school yard, and they still won't face the fact that we should've glided into the white hosue - that even had Bush cheated we should've won clearly because he's the worse, but no, we were too smug about his "low intelligence" and we didn't do the hard work - the real work - never mind that the dumbocrats sent hundreds of lawyers and other "monitors" to key states - and they were still smart enough to cheat - they desverve to win and we deserve nothing but whining impotent bloggers who hold no chips and bring nothing to the table. When the right lost to Clinton, they didn't look back and whine, they moved forward, but the left can only look back because even now we have NO ONE to send to the White House - we've done nothing to convince America that Bush is a schmuck - luckily he does that for us, but you'd never know we have a strong left wing...

Because we don't! Keep whinging leftist losers - maybe in 2008 you can whine again about hanging chads...

I offer this not as evidence, but just someting to ponder: election fraud has gone on forever. Why would the Bush administration NOT have tried to steal the election? Is the assertion that they stole the 2004 election really that more fantastic than them using fake intelligence and lies to rally public support for the Iraq invasion?

These people are thoroughly Machiavellian. The Bush administration lied about social security, lied about their regressive tax policy, lied about Iraq, etc. How many times were Bush and Cheney caught lying during the campaign? "I've never met John Edwards," "I never said I didn't care about Osama bin Laden."

They have lied about so many thngs so repeatedly, yet they ran a clean campaign and a clean election? Where's the proof that the election WASN'T rigged? Manjoo doesn't address that question.

Nope, I offer no evidence, just some questions to think about.

Why did you choose Farhad Manjoo to review this book? He published about 6 articles after the election declaring that there was no election theft. Since he has worked to hard to convince everyone there was no fraud, it seems to me he was an inappropriate choice to do this review.

So long as the official line on the work of Mark Crispin Miller and others on the issue of election theft in 2004 is the work of Farhad Manjoo alone, I refuse to give a penny to Salon and encourage others to do the same. If Salon wants to subsidize Manjoo's hack attack, more power to it, but without a single writer on the Salon staff really presenting the compelling evidence which has grown over the past year through the work of Miller and the Free Press, among others, it has evaded its responsibilities of dealing with the most important political issue of the day and ceases to lay any claim to being a truly alternative voice to the establishment media. I have more respect for Keith Olbermann of MSNBC and his handling of the 2004 election: if you had him present a fairer case, I will become a subscriber. Until then, I will put my money elsewhere...

In the review, Farhad Manjoo mentions the "big news" about John Kerry believing the election was stolen, according to Mark Crispin Miller. If this was such a big story, why is this the first time it's been mentioned in Salon.com? I was eagerly anticipating something in War Room, maybe, but I found nothing. I guess Farhad Manjoo knows how to make baseless "claims," too.

Before saying anything else I should say that I do think the 2004 election was stolen by the Republicans, mainly through voter list purges of likely Democratic voters (working people, especially African Americans) and other means. One can�t rule out tampering with election machinery in some precincts, but this is apparently impossible to prove or disprove with the paperless machines that were used. Most people now agree that a verifiable, re-countable audit trail of elections is necessary to help prevent vote fraud.

However, it seems to me that the best guarantee of a fair election is one in which the margin of victory is not one or two per cent but five or ten per cent. An election won or lost by a percentage point or less is readily subject to fraud, or just human error. Thousands of people counting millions of votes is almost impossible to carry out with guarantees of absolute accuracy. Winning small counts for a lot - just look at the mess the country is in right now � but winning big really counts.

The Bush Administration has done itself in. The bank of �political capital� that George W. Bush claimed in November, 2004, was almost insolvent the day he started drawing on it. If honest Democrats and Republicans in Congress will now simply investigate and demand the truth about the falsehoods and misrepresentations made by Bush and the neo-conservative cabal around him as they drove the nation into war, the Administration will not be able to survive the process as it is today. The struggle for the truth will shape the 2006 Congressional elections and the 2008 Presidential election. An overwhelming majority at the polls for turning the country back from the disastrous course set by the current administration is definitely possible.

Working for this is the best guarantee of honest elections in 2006 and 2008.

Ted Pearson

This book may well be as bad as you say, but you spend more time supporting the competing claim and attacking the messenger than addressing real flaws in the research.