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I'm a fan of Farhad Manjoo, and I appreciate his critique of Robert Kennedy Jr.'s Rolling Stone article. Manjoo's legitimate points notwithstanding, Kennedy's article was far more important than Manjoo estimates. Sadly, it is a relatively tiny minority of people who have read Mark Crispin Miller's Fooled Again, or who even read Salon. Manjoo, then, is wrong when he says that "nothing here is new." Robert Kennedy commands a certain sort of attention that these other sources simply do not. And this article has prompted a response from the mainstream media that even Congressman Conyers was unable to muster. Manjoo feels the arguments presented are not new, but what's key here is that the *audience* is new, and large, and this is significant.
OK, Kennedy couldn't prove election fraud beyond a shadow of a doubt, so does that mean that the article should not have been written? Manjoo's point-by-point breakdown is well-argued. But this is not a college debate contest - it's a crucially important topic that needs wider exposure.
Moreover, many of Manjoo's arguments against Kennedy's arguments are also open for debate. As a sociologist who teaches research methods myself, I would engage with him on some of the discussions of the reliability of exit polls, for example. But what purpose is served by this sort of quibbling? There is enough data, even in Manjoo's rebuttal, that there were irregularities enough to warrant a full-blown public debate. Disenfranchisement is not OK, whether it would have resulted in a clear Kerry victory or not. And Kennedy's article does more to open this topic than anything else has to date.
Manjoo's criticism's do point out that Kennedy's article is vulnerable to attack, which may be helpful. But Manjoo's article is also symptomatic of what is really wrong with the Left - we waste time in highly intellectual argument over the details of each other's positions, while the other side accomplish its goals, and in doing so does actual damage to the physical world, human and civil rights, and the democratic process itself.
