Where Left Is Right / The Old Site

When can a 5,000-plus-word magazine article be called "concise"? When it's Mark Crispin Miller's "None Dare Call It Stolen," at the Harper's Magazine site. And it's concise because it boils down the Conyers report on the 2004 Ohio election hijinks into a single swallowable chunk. (I almost said "easily digestible," but fear that would be abusing the language.)

If you, like I, haven't for one reason or another read the full report, be sure to check out Miller's excellent summary. (The full report is available online as a 102-page, 3MB PDF document, entitled "Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio.") Check it out regardless of your political persuasion (although if you're reading it from the right wing, just kind of skip over Miller's expressions of disgust and read the facts presented). Miller is charitable; he says:

The Framers could no more conceive of electoral fraud on such a scale than they could picture Fox News Channel or the Pentagon; and so we have no constitutional recourse, should it be proven, finally, that the wrong guy "won." The point of our revisiting the last election, rather, is to see exactly what the damage was so that the people can demand appropriate reforms.

What he may have thought but did not for some reason make explicit is that if even a third of these allegations are true (he believes they all are), it will be yet another nail in the coffin of The Weasel's sorry tenure in office.

Here's my favorite passage (aside from the thrill of seeing all the damning evidence itself, I mean):

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization," Thomas Jefferson said, "it expects what never was and never will be." That much-quoted line foretells precisely what has happened to us since "the news" has turned into a daily paraphrase of Karl Rove’s fevered dreams. Just as 2+2=5 in Orwell's Oceania, so here today the United States just won two brilliant military victories, 9/11 could not have been prevented, we live in a democracy (like the Iraqis), and last year's presidential race "was, at the end of the day, an honest election" [as claimed by Republican Congressman Bill Shuster of Pennsylvania]. Such claims, presented as the truth, are nothing but faith-based reiteration, as valid as the notions that one chooses to be homosexual, that condoms don't prevent the spread of HIV, and that the universe was made 6,000 years ago.

An interesting list of delusions, nicht wahr? I'm sure I don't know to whom he's referring. Anyone holding such a clutch of misbegotten notions about the way the world works must surely be insulated from reality!