Theft, He Bleats!
Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted — enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.
That’s the headline that accompanies Robert Kennedy, Jr’s. article in Rolling Stone magazine wherein he reheats the old argument that Bush Stole The Election.
Look, I’m not going to get into debunking Kennedy’s venture into Tinfoil Hatland. It’s been done before. A lot. If you really want to get into the nuts and bolts disassembling of Kennedy’s slander, you can read Captain Ed’s definitive takedown of Kennedy’s religious dependence on exit polls, Dan Riehl’s review of an NPR dismissal last week, and Don Surber’s counter-rant.
They say all that needs to be said specifically about the details of Kennedy’s piece. Addressing Kennedy point-by-point is like arguing with the crazy man on the corner who wears the sandwich board that says “The End is Nigh”.
I do want to direct you to an interesting point made by Confederate Yankee. In the RS article, the obvious and recurring villain is then-Secretary of State Ken Blackwell. Blackwell is currently in a dogfight for Governor of Ohio and, according to the latest news, has pulled to within 6 percentage points of Democratic candidate and Congressman Ted Strickland.
Says Confederate Yankee:
Kennedy’s article was constructed for on reason, and one reason only; to smear a black fiscal and socially conservative candidate that has charisma, integrity, and cross-cultural appeal–in short, a real chance of winning. Blackwell defeated Attorney General Jim Petro in the 2006 Republican primary with 56% of the vote, and has been significantly closing the gap with Democratic frontrunner Ted Strickland in recent weeks. Strickland led Blackwell by 16 points in a Russmussen poll on May 8, but that gap has dramatically to just six points in a May 25 UC-Ohio poll.
As Blackwell continues to close in on a candidate that seems increasingly unable to find traction, the Kennedy assault targeting Blackwell’s duties in the 2004 President elections seems like nothing less than an attempt to smear a black conservative and attempt to save the 2006 Ohio governorship Strickland seems primed to fumble away.
Ohio Democrats fear a Strickland loss, but the national Democratic Party fears that Blackwell may be in the vanguard of black conservatives that may cut across racial and party lines, eroding their traditional stranglehold on the black vote.
That sounds just about right to me.
There’s one more thing I want to address. As you might expect, the lefty bloggers have been all over this article like it was handed down to them from the Mount (which, I suppose, it could have been). Among those is the Huffington-created blogger Jane Hamsher who utters this laughable “truth”:
Trying to keep people from voting is anti-Democratic and anti-American, and there are few places where wingnuttia’s contempt for democracy becomes more blatantly obvioius.
Apparently, Jane doesn’t follow the news much at all.
In an unexpected twist in the Election Day tire slashing trial, four former Kerry-Edwards campaign staffers, including the sons of U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Milwaukee) and former Acting Mayor Marvin Pratt, have agreed to plead no contest to misdemeanors. Prosecutors will recommend probation sentences as part of the deal.
The plea agreements came in the middle of jury deliberations after an eight-day trial on felony property damage charges that carried potential 3 1/2 year prison terms upon conviction.
Nor, apparently, did she have any knowledge of this detailed report.
You would think that, as adults, folks like Hamsher and Kennedy would learn to let the silly accusations go, but they can’t. The reason they can’t is because they can not, for any reason, admit that their candidate was perhaps the worst major candidate for the office since Walter Mondale. The can’t admit that the majority of Americans (in fact, a record number of Americans) got a very good look at their guy and rejected him and his beliefs. To them, losing the 2004 Eection wasn’t merely a political setback, it was a personal rebuke from people they honestly consider their intellectual inferiors. They are the worst type of elitists – ones who have all the condescention and arrogance of a religious fanatic without the high position from which to sneer on the common rabble.
They are mentally incapable of accepting a political defeat and so they trot out the same tired conspiracies and the hollow platitudes.
The shame is that they’ll continue to do this even if it means another embarassing loss to a Republican Party weaker and more bereft of meaningful principles than it’s been since the 1970s. It’s a shame because, if they could summon just a couple intellectually-defensible plans for fixing what they believe is wrong with the country, they’d win in a landslide.
UPDATE: If you’re a lefty, and Salon gives you a debunking with the vigor and kindness one generally associates with prison shower rooms and dropped soap, you definitely have a problem.
No related posts.
Category: Moonbat Nonsense, Oh, THAT liberal media., President George Bush
The articles you cite that refute RFK’s story sound like they never made it past the first page. Exit polls were just one of the too many coincidences. This article exposes irrefutable evidence of fraud. Are we surprised? With the GOP convictions in the NH phone-jamming scandal, Frist and DeLay in trouble for election/campaign related issues, you might not be surprised but this story deserves the attention of ALL AMERICANS. This is our democracy we’re talking about. This story is more important than the Iraq War, 9/11, and the rest… this is the very fabric of our democracy, what our soldiers have been dying for since 1776. READ THIS ARTICLE. Don’t fall into the same BS GOP tactic/mindset of “smear the messenger.” If you have one once of patriotism and fair-mindedness, READ THIS ARTICLE. It is absolutley a must read.
Hey William. Get your own blog if you want to peddle fairy-tales, okay?
Guess what Monday is? Monday is the day President Bush will speak about an issue near and dear to his heart and the hearts of many conservatives. It’s also the day before the Senate votes on the very same thing. Is it the war? Deficits? Health insurance? Immigration? Iran? Iraq? North Korea?
Not even close. No, the president is going to talk about amending the Constitution in order to ban gay marriage. This is something that absolutely, positively has no chance of happening, nada, zippo, none. But that doesn’t matter. Mr. Bush will take time to make a speech. The Senate will take time to talk and vote on it, because it’s something that matters to the Republican base.
This is pure politics. It has nothing to do with whether or not you believe in gay marriage. It’s blatant posturing by Republicans, who are increasingly desperate as the midterm elections approach. There’s not a lot else to get people interested in voting for them, based on their record of the last five years.
But if you can appeal to the hatred, bigotry, or discrimination in some people, you might move them to the polls to vote against that big, bad gay married couple that one day might in down the street.
Nice party you have there Jimmie, nice chimp of a president too. “W”
= worst.
Hey William,
1) You’re way off-topic.
2) There’s an argument against gay marriage that has nothing whatsoever to do with “discrimination”. In fact, it’s anti-discriminatory.
3) I”m not a Republican.
jimmie,
1) seems to me william is right on target.
2) link to that arguement when you get a moment, please.
3) god bless you!
Robert, I do not have a link to the argument, though I have made it here before. I am sure that if you look around, in the interest of finding principled arguments on boht sides of the issue, you will find it. It’s not an uncommon one.