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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
I have written several times about Manjoo's sloppy analysis of this issue in past articles. This one is no different. His insistence on taking an issue by issue approach to the problem, rather than weighing the evidence as a whole, taking it synthetically as a scientist would, makes his conclusions suspect from the start. Perhaps a greater problem is that he sees any spurious rationale for a problem as proving that there were no seedy, and perhaps illegal influences on this election.
Whether consciously or not, his analysis fits itself right into the Right-Wing talking points about "conspiracy theories." They like to argue that there could have been no large-scale conspiracy focused on stealing the election--and to a certain extent they're right. The idea that there were shadowy figures guiding armies of conspirators to steal the election is somewhat silly. Of course, this argument is also nothing more than a strawman. It's not a matter of coordinated conspiracy, but rather coordinated interests, and a willingness to do whatever it takes to enact their messianic vision that unites the activities of diverse Right-Wing actors who have worked to steal this election at the local, state and national levels.
Kennedy's arguments point to problems, inconsistencies, not conspiracies. These problems and inconsistencies can identify the motives of a large number of individually operating agents who do not coordinate their activities, but who have similar goals and use whatever means they posess to accomplish those goals (including, for example, allowing the inertia of the bureaucracy to swallow valid votes by not taking the lead to ensure proper allocation of voting machines on election day). Citing spurious arguments to explain away each one of these problems might satisfy someone who has a perverse need to believe that the system is operating as it should (a category that includes a large portion of the population, as Manjoo would know if he had ever taken any sociology or empirical psychology courses, and maybe watched the Milgram films). However, it should not satisfy those who seek the truth--which is, I think, what most enlightened readers look to Salon for.
I really wish Salon would refuse to allow Manjoo to publish these poorly written, poorly reasoned pieces. It degrades your publication and diminishes its credibility. Giving Manjoo a keyboard is about as responsible as giving a three year-old permanent markers and then leaving the house.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/6/3/224759/7766
A Good Critique of Manjoo at Daily Kos
Which means it's about as reliable as that guy on the corner who thinks he's Napoleon ...
While Manjoo seeks to discredit RFK's excellent piece on the 2004 election, and says Kennedy would rather press the hot button than propose a solution, I find Manjoo's tenacious rejection of hanky-panky in Ohio silly on its face.
I traveled, at my own expense, to Columbus Ohio in October 2004, and spent some considerable time going door-to-door for the Kerry campaign. I also spent time with professional operatives from Kerry's national headquarters who were there to help and to monitor Blackwell's repeated, and widely publicized, attempts to suppress the Democratic vote even before the election.
I found overwhelming Kerry support sufficient to say that the only Bush supporters I came in contact with were in the Republican suburbs, none of which were short of voting machines on election day or had long lines waiting to vote.
What has puzzled me, actually made me quite angry, however, is Kerry's inaction following the election. His operatives in Columbus outlined for me, and the many other volunteers who have traveled from far and wide, precisely the kinds of tactics they expected or were already seeing to deny Kerry a victory in Ohio. They also claimed they had 2,500 volunteer lawyers ready to stop the shenanigans before and after election day. When Kerry conceded without any fight I couldn't understand why, and I still don't.
When someone, like Manjoo, denies the reality of something I have experienced personally my inclination is to ignore them, and I certainly will ignore Manjoo from now on. I don't know what his agenda is, but he's got one, and it doesn't have much to do with the truth. Kennedy is far from perfect (I have known him for 20 years), and he's far more credible than whatever the rightwing serves up through Manjoo.
I was sorry to see Salon publish this deceptive piece.
In this debate there are several things that we know for sure. First, the election was very close. Second, there were many discrepancies and "dirty tricks," especially in Ohio. However, this is really all that we can know for sure. It is possible that the true will of the voters in Ohio was for Kerry to win, but it is also possible that it was for Bush to win. Anyone who asserts that they know for sure one way or the other is not being intellectually honest. Manjoo does a fair job looking more closely at some of the claims in Kennedy's article, but he also fails, as many letters have pointed out, to consider all of the claims together and to entertain the hypothesis that Kerry might actually have been the voter's true choice. Manjoo interprets the supposed numbers of of votes lost or voters disenfranchised on the low side, Kennedy on the high. The reality is probably somewhere in the middle, but we have no way of knowing where.
This debate tends to invoke strong emotions on both sides, and it tends to get ugly quickly due to the impossibility of reaching a verifiable answer to the question, what was the voter's true will in Ohio? Now, American history is filled with dirty elections. The reason for this is simply that there are huge incentives, especially in a Presidential election, to win and therefore to find ways to cheat. It is a failing of our winner-take-all system that a candidate representing a party that gets close to or even over fifty percent of the vote can get no executive power. We all know the irrational limits of the electoral system in the present day and many feel it should be abolished. I would argue further that a Parliamentary system would be more representative. Under such a system those disputed votes in Ohio would not decide the whole election and therefore be the sticking point for years to come in a debate with no clear answer. They would instead determine a tiny percentage of some party's total representation, in direct accordance with their size of the population.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
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Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
