Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - Was the 2004 Presidential election stolen?
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - Was the 2004 Presidential election stolen?My first thought on reading the article: oh, boy, the Democrats are whining again - would y'all just get over it already?
Second thoughts:
So, if the big bad Ohio Republicans (and I admit they're bad - most parties that control their turf for too long a time virtually unchallenged have a tendency to get that way) hadn't rigged the vote, Bush would've lost the electoral vote but still won the popular vote by several *million* - much, much more than Gore did with respect to the popular vote in 2000. (Gore's getting more of the popular vote being a fact that the Dems proceeded to whine about unceasingly for the following 4 years - no small amount of irony there). Another irony: RFK Jr's famous late uncle John benefited from the same kind of state and county-level election shenanigans in Illinois in 1960, thanks to legendary Chicago mayor Richard Daly and his infamous Cook county political machine. In that case the result of the overall election wasn't swayed by what happened in Illinois, but it's curious that Bobby Jr. failed to mention that little bit of family history.
As to the allegations made by RFK Jr. in the aforementioned article, Here's an article from the Dayton Daily News which deconstructs the major points of Kennedy's conspiracy theory. Another similarly devastating demolition of Kennedy's "facts", "plausible inferences" and "logic" comes to us courtesy of our hard-core right-wing-fringe friends at Salon.com.
Anyway, the Dems need to stop crying and perhaps instead try coming up with a candidate more people feel like voting for. Of course long-term we need to abolish this anachronistic electoral-college mumbo-jumbo entirely - the problem there is that a whole lot of people (and I don't just mean the major parties and their candidates) appear to have a vested interest in perpetuating it.
I keep saying, whatever you think of G. W. Bush, there's a kind of backhanded justice in him winning a second term - it makes him entirely responsible for cleaning up the mess his administration is responsible for in Iraq. You broke it, you bought it.
But enough about silly world politics - weren't we just talking about Bahhbby Kennedy Juniahh, famous-coattails-rider extraordinaire and non-fact-checking InstaPundit? Bobby should stick to the coffee-table Kennedy memorabilia circuit ("Jackie O: My favorite tat lace doilies of the Camelot Era," 300pp, deluxe oversized coffee table edition available in a strictly limited edition of 10 million, just $399.95 at finer bookstores everywhere), and perhaps Rolling Stone should stick to popular music - you'd have thought that at least *one* editor there would've put down his nozzle to the shared office hash hookah long enough to say "whoa, man, maybe we should check some of these claims before publishing them ... dudes, I am, like, so wasted ..." I mean, even the democrats' own fact-finding commission debunked most of the more egregious electoral-fraud claims long ago, its salient conclusion being: “Despite the problems on Election Day, there is no evidence from our survey that John Kerry won the state of Ohio.”