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I think part of the problem with Manjoo's article is the attitude expressed in a headline that even the article itself does not really support.** Instead of a big headline blaring a certainty ("Was the 2004 election stolen? No"), how about a headline like "Was the 2004 election stolen? We can't be sure."
Manjoo seems to have his mind made up to nitpick RFK Jr's. Rolling Stone article, to poke holes in a fashion that comes across as haughty and dismissive. It's almost as if he takes RFK Jr.'s article as a personal affront to his own previous (ill-drawn) conclusions.
No matter what the editor's confidence in Manjoo may be, the fact that the readers of Salon have no confidence in him at all on this issue should lead them to assign other writers to cover this story. Manjoo simply appears incapable of addressing the issue fairly. His conclusion that we can know that election 2004 was absolutely not stolen is no more supportable than the conclusion of others who say that we know for certain that it was. And besides, the conclsuion drawn by RFK Jr. is not certainty that the election was stolen. The conclusion he draws is this:
The issue of what happened in 2004 is not an academic one. For the second election in a row, the president of the United States was selected not by the uncontested will of the people but under a cloud of dirty tricks. Given the scope of the GOP machinations, we simply cannot be certain that the right man now occupies the Oval Office -- which means, in effect, that we have been deprived of our faith in democracy itself.
In other words, Manjoo has set up a strawman just so he could knock it down. He has lost the confidence of the readers. He should no longer be assigned to this issue.
**Quote: To date, dozens of experts, both independently and as part of several research panels, have spent countless hours examining 2004's presidential election, especially the race in Ohio. Many of them have concluded that the election there strains conventional notions of what a democracy ought to look like; very little about that race was fair, clean or competent. Way back in January 2005, a panel headed by Democratic Rep. John Conyers of Michigan reported that it had found enough irregularities in Ohio to call into question the state election results and the entire presidential vote. A report by the Democratic Party released last year found "evidence of voter confusion, voter suppression, and negligence and incompetence of election officials."
