One week after Kennedy's article appeared, Salon posted an attack upon it by Farhad Manjoo, the magazine's technology reporter. That piece contained so many errors of fact and logic, and was throughout so brazenly wrong-headed, that several hundred readers sent in angry letters, many of them brilliantly refuting some of Manjoo's misconceptions and mistakes, and quite a few demanding that Salon cancel their subscriptions.
A few days later, Joan Walsh, Salon's editor, tried to calm the storm with a defense of Manjoo's writings on the theft of the 2004 election -- a theft that he had frequently addressed before, as he had been trying to "debunk"it ever since that infamous Election Day. Walsh did not answer any of the criticisms of Manjoo's attack, but merely re-asserted Salon's confidence in all his work for them.
At this point I decided to reply, both to Manjoo's piece (which, as I note below, had wrongly used my own work on election fraud to further slander Kennedy's) and to Joan Walsh's apologia. My point was not just to pile on (there was no need for that), but to attempt an explanation as to why so many reasonable people -- many of them self-described "progressives" -- keep refusing to perceive the copious and ever-growing evidence that this regime has never been elected. It was my hope that Salon might at least consider moderating its position on election fraud, which now demands more serious treatment than the magazine has thus far given it.
I believe that that assertion too is wrong, and that the issues here are far too grave for "the debate" to be thus prematurely halted; and so I'm very pleased that HuffPost has agreed to run my e-mail as an open letter.
Dear Joan,
I'd like to thank Salon for touching off this spirited debate on Farhad Manjoo's argument with Robert Kennedy, Jr., and also want to thank you in particular for your own personal defense of Manjoo's writings on election fraud. I am especially impressed by your desire "to place this debate in its proper political context." Such careful explanation is exactly what we need; and so I'd like to help shed just a bit more light upon that context, by clarifying the record as you have described it.
In defense of Manjoo's writings since Election Day 2004, you claim (just as he has often claimed) that Salon cares tremendously about the problem of election fraud, and always has: "Salon has aggressively covered Republican efforts to suppress Democratic voter participation going back to December 2000," and has "followed the story doggedly ever since." In 2002, you claim, "Manjoo expanded Salon's coverage of our flawed election system with a special focus on the problems with electronic voting." Since then, you write, "[h]e has approached his stories on the massive problems with voting in this country in the same way, with an open mind." In his zealous drive to learn the truth, you say, "he did not find evidence" of any widespread fraud in Georgia in 2002 (where Democrat Max Cleland lost his Senate seat, surprisingly, to Saxby Chambliss, and Democrat Roy Barnes was, also surprisingly, ousted as governor by Sonny Perdue). And, two years later, you remind us, Manjoo found nothing to confirm the view that fraud decided Bush's re-election in Ohio.
And so Salon has, for the last six years, been searching earnestly for "evidence" of fraud, and finding nothing but "unproven charges." If I may say so, this version of your history is not credible. First of all, it begs the question -- for there is vast evidence of fraud, as the letters you've received make wholly clear. Certainly you have the right to keep insisting that there is no evidence, and Manjoo certainly has every right to quibble with whichever single claim he may perceive as bogus or exaggerated. Neither move per se, however, can negate the copious, precise and ever-growing evidence of massive fraud in 2004, any more than the tobacco companies could negate the evidence that cigarettes are lethal, or the US religious right suppress the evidence of natural selection, or of global warming. As it's the evidence that matters above all, Salon's readers ought to be encouraged to study it themselves, and not accept mere claims about it, whether yours or mine.
So let me move beyond that fundamental argument, and make a more specific criticism of your recent statement in defense of Salon's treatment of election fraud. That statement obscures the fact that Manjoo's attitude toward his subject -- and, therefore, Salon's position -- has been strangely inconsistent. On the one hand, you are surely right to say that he has done some excellent reporting on the looming danger of election fraud -- before Nov. 2 of that fateful year. Back then he did a fine job covering several sinister developments, including the shenanigans of Nathan Sproul, a theocratic activist whose firm, Sproul & Associates, conducted bogus voter-registration drives in at least six states, covertly registering people as Republicans without their knowledge, and often trashing forms filled out by Democrats. (As I point out in Fooled Again, my book on the 2004 election, SEC records suggest that Sproul may also have abetted the subversion of the recount in Ohio.) In fact, I thought so highly of Manjoo's reporting pre-Election Day that I was often guided by it in my own research for Fooled Again, and therefore even thanked him warmly in the book's acknowledgments (p. 349). Considering such trenchant work throughout the presidential race, it seemed, to say the least, quite odd that Manjoo suddenly and absolutely shifted ground as soon as Bush's unexpected victory was official. Where he had indeed been dogged and impartial in exposing some real threats to the integrity of the election, ex post facto he seemed far less interested in dealing with the evidence of GOP malfeasance than in jeering every effort to discuss it. Instead of careful scrutiny of that evidence, he resorted mainly to sarcastic hooting and ad hominem assault -- the same tactics that the Bush Republicans themselves have always used to cast all argument about their unexpected win as sheer insanity.
That is what Manjoo did in his review of Fooled Again, accusing me of "fraud," "pseudo-journalism," lying and venality. (My reply to that piece is here.) In his attack on Robert Kennedy's article he has done the same thing once again -- trashing Kennedy's motives, and accusing him, essentially, of plagiarism: "Nothing here is new. If you've ... read Mark Crispin Miller's 'Fooled Again,' you're already familiar with everything Kennedy has to say." That claim is quite false. Kennedy and Rolling Stone have given us a shattering new view of the Ohio travesty, based both on prodigious journalistic synthesis and remarkable firsthand research. Its interviews alone -- especially with Lou Harris, the polling eminence, who deems Ohio stolen by Bush/Cheney -- are, or ought to be, big news. While I am proud to say that Kennedy considers Fooled Again a major inspiration, I cannot claim that he derived much information from my book. His focus is entirely on Ohio, whereas Fooled Again devotes only some 15 pages (out of 350) to the crimes and improprieties committed in that state. My book deals with the election fraud committed nationwide in 2004 -- as Manjoo knows. Why, then, would he say that Kennedy had cribbed it all from me? Far from wanting Salon's readers to assess the evidence themselves, he seems to want people not even to know about it -- certainly a strange objective for a writer with "an open mind."
What explains this eagerness to kill all conversation on an issue of such grave importance? This is not a question just about Farhad Manjoo and/or Salon, because your way of dealing, or not dealing, with this all-important matter has been typical of the entire US political establishment throughout Bush/Cheney's reign. This general silence has prevented us from facing an enormous threat to our democracy, which is now at unprecedented risk. We might start to illuminate this problem by doing now exactly what you claim you want to do: "place this debate in its proper political context." Let us therefore reconsider your reporter's violent post-election U-turn, which had him all at once reflexively deriding the very story that he had himself been very capably reporting.
What Manjoo did after Election Day was simply gallop off into the journalistic herd as it went thundering rightward, parroting the Bush machine's own talking points. According to Ken Blackwell, Tom DeLay, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Karl Rove and others, the election was a simple slam dunk for the president, however many and astounding the anomalies, and even if the numbers actually did not add up, or the official explanation ("family values") make a lick of sense; and anybody who suggested otherwise was, a priori, a "sore loser" and/or "paranoid," a "moonbat" venting mere "conspiracy theory," etc. "No voter disenfranchisement occurred in this election of 2004," said Tom DeLay. "It was, at the end of the day, an honest election," said Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA). Between such propaganda and the post-election coverage in the US press there was no difference whatsoever. With the heroic exception of Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, right after Election Day the mainstream press re-echoed the Republican barrage with groundless catcalls of its own. "Election paranoia surfaces; Conspiracy theorists call results rigged," laughed the Baltimore Sun; "Internet Buzz on Vote Fraud Is Dismissed," chuckled the Boston Globe; "Latest Conspiracy Theory -- Kerry Won -- Hits the Ether," the Washington Post giggled; and the New York Times was most derisive of them all, with a broadside -- "Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly Buried" -- that mocked not just the rampant "theories" of election fraud but cyberspace itself, with its "Web log hysteria," "on-line market of dark ideas," and "breathless cycle of hey-check-this-out," etc.
Such was the consensus that Manjoo too suddenly embraced, thereby bringing Salon fully into line with all the corporate media; nor was Manjoo's a lonely voice in the progressive media, which also either laughed off or ignored the evidence of fraud. No left/liberal publication, whether on- or off-line, focused on that evidence, nor did the story make a national splash on leftist radio, nor, aside from John Conyers and Jesse Jackson, did any lefty media stars take up the cause. By and large, the left press based its blithe dismissals of the issue not on any careful sifting of that evidence but on the mere say-so of certain politicians. Mother Jones ran a piece by Mark Hertsgaard, purporting to debunk the "theory" that Bush/Cheney stole Ohio. For evidence Hertsgaard relied on the assurances of various Ohio Democrats, who swore to him that there had been no fraud. Posting on TomPaine.com, Russ Baker likewise mocked the widespread "theories" of election fraud, on the basis of a brief trip to Ohio where he also talked to Democrats who swore to him that there had been no fraud. Once Election Day was past, The Nation also, like Salon, at once forgot its pre-election coverage of impending problems -- in particular, a powerful overview by Ronnie Dugger -- and simply dropped the subject, other than to ridicule the "theory" that Ohio had been stolen; David Corn, for instance, took that line, basing it on what he'd heard from certain Democrats who swore to him that there had been no fraud. And when we look back at the corporate media's non-coverage of this crucial story, we find that the consensus came not only from the bellicose Republicans, but also from those Democrats who swore repeatedly that there had been no fraud.
On the other hand, those maverick Democrats who had seen evidence of fraud, and who were keen to publicize it -- Conyers, Jackson, Stephanie Tubbs-Jones and others -- weren't consulted by the press, which largely snubbed those activists and statisticians who had studied the election fraud in depth. (Robert Koehler of Tribune News Services was a heroic exception.) Thus the media, both corporate and left/liberal, favored only those who genuflected at the party line, which both parties were assiduously toeing. According to the journalistic groupthink, any Democrat who duly exculpated the Republicans was necessarily (a) well informed about what really happened on Election Day, and (b) being completely honest, on the record. In fact, some of those Democrats were clueless, or reluctant to go public with the truth. For instance, Bill Anthony, the Democratic chair of Franklin County's Board of Elections, has quietly contradicted what he said both to Manjoo and Baker, telling Bob Fitrakis, on the record, that he does believe Bush/Cheney stole Ohio, largely by fiddling with the numbers in the rural counties in the state's Southwest (a major vote-theft, as Kennedy explains in Rolling Stone). On the issue of election fraud, the Democrats observed the code of omerta. In Who Counts?, Dorothy Fadiman's forthcoming documentary on Republican election fraud, Bob Hagan, a Democratic state senator from Youngstown, tells of having had his own e-vote for Kerry flip to Bush -- a glitch that wiped out Kerry votes throughout Ohio (and at least a dozen other states), and yet the Democrats told Hagan not to mention it: "The Kerry campaign said, 'Leave it alone. Don't talk about it. It's not something we want to get out.'"
So much for the democratic spirit of the Democratic Party, which, in burying the most important civic issue of our time, has been just as complicit as the GOP, although they cloud the issue far less rudely. Take "Democracy at Risk," the DNC report on the election in Ohio, which came out in the summer of 2005. The document appears to be a very damning study of Republican malfeasance in Ohio. It offers many harrowing statistics, and some strong firsthand accounts, of Democratic disenfranchisement throughout the state -- only to deny that fraud had anything to do with it. The problem, rather, was "incompetence," which was somehow epidemic in Ohio on Election Day, and which, stranger still, invariably helped Bush/Cheney and hurt Kerry/Edwards. The report is not exactly readable, with long abstruse equations covering page after page -- a haze of math that does not quite conceal the bald self-contradictions that distort the document like heavy cracks across a windshield. For instance, the report confirms, in various ways, that there were far too few machines only in Democratic precincts, while the number of machines in GOP strongholds was more than adequate. Then, out of nowhere, toward the end, we're told that members of both parties were affected equally by the statewide shortage of machines, so that the glitch did not, of course, affect the outcome of the race.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
