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• Sunday, June 4, 2006 08:51 AM

  Defenders of Manjoo have gone through the looking glass

  The people writing in to defend Manjoo congratulate him for refusing to "pander" to the ostensibly unthinking liberals who can't countenance the possibility that the fix wasn't in in Ohio in 2004.

  Nonsense.

  As those objecting to Manjoo's article have stated ad nauseum, the problem with his "analysis" is not that he won't accept Kennedy's thesis (that there were too many troubling aspects to the 2004 vote to have confidence in its declared outcome) unquestioningly, but rather that he takes an absolutist position (that the election was NOT stolen and that anyone who says otherwise is a LIAR) and then tortures the evidence to "support" his predetermined conclusion.

  I am quite confident that if Manjoo had taken a more reasonable and intellectually honest position -- that no one can know for sure whether or not the election was stolen but that troubling circumstances abound -- the responses would have been far less heated.

  Finally, the suggestion that the fact that readers are cancelling their subscriptions somehow validates Manjoo's status as a truth-seeker can only be described as a head-first dive through the looking glass. It is entirely legitimate for readers to object to being subjected to right-wing propaganda, which any honest reader will recognize Manjoo's article to be. Salon is not supposed to be "The Limbaugh Letter." If Salon started running essays by Bill O'Reilly and readers cancelled their subscriptions in protest, would that somehow magically prove that Mr. No-Spin-Zone isn't a right-wing hack after all? Sorry, "not a con," but the world doesn't work that way. You aren't automatically proven right by the fact that people disagree with you.

  —Yossarian Read Yossarian's other letters
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