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Manjoo’s piece may have exposed some of Kennedy’s faulty conclusions about the Ohio results, but it failed to satisfactorily address the overall arch of Kennedy’s, and our, complaint. There were things about the Ohio results that indicated something was afoot. Coming on the heels of the 2000 election, the fact that Blackwell, as was widely reported in the press, engaged in administrative tricks and legal machinations to thwart or influence the outcome of the election, the thin margins of victory, the reports on the ground of long lines in Democratic strongholds, the provisional balloting screw-ups, etc., all add up to there being some degree of effort on behalf of state and some local officials to deliver the state to Bush. (It appears that in every “foul up” or “glitch” in the system, regardless of where it occurred in the state, it involved an over counting of Bush votes, which is difficult to accept as mere chance.) It’s highly doubtful that there was a “master plan“, hatched by the Machiavellian Rove in co-hoots with Diebold and local partisan flacks. (More like, "Ken, do what you gotta do." Wink, wink)
Manjoo is focused on proving Kennedy wrong on the details (he's still upbraiding Kennedy for his alturism story?) not on addressing this issue, which several others have raised without getting any answers. There was nothing new in Majoo’s piece. He wrote the same piece a while back. Any legal or constitutional questions aside, the concern is whether the efforts and activities of state and local election officials were the tipping point that delivered the state to Bush. We will most assuredly never get an answer to that question. I don’t know anything about how to “steal” an election in the United States, but I suspect there are any number of ways to accomplish it, in the same way that Congress has, whether Republican or Democratic, of seeing to it that their employers, the corporate cartels, syndicates, banks and other special interests (in this admin., religious), who pay for their political campaigns, are repaid and supported with taxpayers’ largesse. How do I love thee? Oh let me count the ways!
That the way in which the U.S. conducts elections is rickety, out-dated, and subject to rather easy manipulation is not new information. Little if anything has been done to effectively change that. In the same way that no meaningful changes have been made in the ethics rules governing governmental employees in the wake of the Abramoff scandals.
It is somewhat of a mystery why Kerry didn’t put up a fight over the Ohio results, although he didn’t put up much of a fight during the campaign either (His lackluster campaign was appalling, even though every issue was in his favor. And then playing dead while the Shit Boaters torpedoed his reputation!) Part of the outcome in Ohio has to be blamed on Kerry and his handlers, who seemed not to understand, or care, that the Republican attack dogs meant to rip out his throat. Politics is a blood sport. Although we too often think of it as a “game”, people literally live or die based on the outcomes. Until our present nightmare has ended, we will wonder what kind of world we’d be living in today with a President Kerry. One would like to believe that at a minimum, he would have made Congress earn their keep.
