I am sure this comes as a disappointment to the unhinged sore losers, but it seems that Robert Kennedy Jr’s rousing expose is not being universally adored.  Apparently some pesky facts have gotten in the way of his stirring tale of fraud and disenfranchisemnt.

Sure, the New York Times has come on board with Bobby Jr, claiming that "the integrity of the election process needs to be more fiercely defended in the face of outrageous Republican assaults. Democrats, the media, and ordinary voters need to fight back."

He must have missed the story about Chad Staton who filled out phony voter registrations, at the request of a NAACP worker, who admitted to paying him crack to do so.

He also likely missed the cases where Democratic staffers slashed tires on the Republican staffers cars in Milwaukee.

Those who shriek "every vote counts" forget that Gore only requested a recount in the heaviest Democrat leaning counties initially, in Florida 2000.

They likely also didn’t hear about the ridiculous chicanery that surrounded the Governor’s election here in Washington.

The point of this is, that saying we need to defend the sanctity of elections is fine….If we protect it from all sides.  If you want to address the problems of fraud, do so from a productive standpoint, and a proactive one, perhaps by inserting security elements such as requiring ID, validation of eligibility to vote and various other measures that make the process more integral.

But back to Bobby.  Today a few people from the media (obviously not the NY Times) fights back against Bobby.

Some Ohio Editors and Reporters Criticize ‘Rolling Stone’ Story on 2004 Alleged Vote Fraud

Did the press really miss the story in the 2004 presidential election of massive voter fraud and conspiracies to keep millions from casting ballots that a recent controversial piece in Rolling Stone has alleged? As the article’s author, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., believes, did news outlets, both nationally and in the battleground state of Ohio, engage in a "media blackout" that ignored what he claims are "deeply troubling" aspects of the election that returned George W. Bush to the White House?

Considering how hostile the media is to Bush I can see no reason why they would protect him.  Clue for you guys, the media does not adore GW.  And really this si the wildest aspect of this: who in their right mind would figure the media to protect him?

If anything Dan Rather would have produced some kinda memo….

Bob Herbert added fuel to the fire on Monday in claiming in his New York Times column that, after the Rolling Stone report, "the integrity of the election process needs to be more fiercely defended in the face of outrageous Republican assaults. Democrats, the media, and ordinary voters need to fight back."

But for many in Ohio who covered the presidential race, which was not decided until the following morning after John Kerry gave up any attempt at challenging the Ohio results, the Rolling Stone allegations are unfounded.

"We looked at the Rolling Stone piece and we didn’t see anything new in there," says Eva Parziale, Associated Press Ohio bureau chief, who held that post in 2004 when the election occurred. "They were things we already reported on and issues we did not see to have substance."

Carl Weiser, government and public affairs editor for the Cincinnati Enquirer, agreed. "I read it and nothing in there was really new," he said. "The folks who know Ohio elections best checked into it and found there was no conspiracy."

But that hasn’t stopped the Kennedy piece from raising interest among others in the newspaper world, particularly on the editorial page, even before the Herbert column.

"In the days since Rolling Stone magazine published a long piece that accused Republicans of widespread and intentional cheating that affected the outcome of the last presidential election, the silence in America’s establishment media has been deafening," Ken Bunting, associate publisher of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and a former editor of the paper, wrote Friday. "In terms of bad news judgment, this could turn out to be the 2006 equivalent of the infamous ‘Downing Street memo,’ the London Times story that was initially greeted by the U.S. Media with a collective yawn."

It could also be that the media has decided that if he wants to scream and shout the same boring and unproven accusations, they are under no obligation aid him, absent actual proof.  Had he actually found a smoking gun, there is no media outlet on the planet that would not have trumpeted it to the heavens.  Not as a matter of liberal bias, but because it is a righteous story.

Kennedy is involved in a long known practice, known as beating a dead horse, and even the media knows that nag is a bloody pulp already.

Kennedy’s article, which is heavily footnoted on the magazine’s web site, draws much of its sourcing from the very newspapers in Ohio and nationally it appears to criticize. The Cincinnati Enquirer, The Blade of Toledo and the Columbus Dispatch, as well as the Times and The Washington Post, appear frequently throughout his long list of background notes.

The piece declares that incidents ranging from broken voting machines in New Mexico to long lines in Ohio to millions of overseas voters not receiving ballots were not given the national media inquiries they deserved. Kennedy writes that "the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ‘conspiracy theories,’ and The New York Times declared that ‘there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale’."

The sad reality is that this stuff happens every year.  There are mistakes.  They should be fixed.  But that in and of itself is not sufficient to to declare this a right wing conspiracy.  The Hubris of the Democrats in insisting that only the Republicans would dare engage in fraud is frankly insulting.

He also refuses the notion that some things really were mistakes.  It is, to him, all a part of Hillary’s vast right wing conspiracy and Pelosi’s Republican Culture of Corruption.

Some of those on the 2004 election beat say Kennedy’s allegations were dismissed because in many cases they were found to have little or no basis, or no proof of impacting the election.

Joe Hallett, a longtime political reporter and columnist at the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch and previously the Plain Dealer, took his own shot at Kennedy’s theories in a Sunday column. He declared that "Democrats still haven’t met the burden of proof" that the election was stolen. He also urged readers to look at a lengthy follow-up story in Salon.com by Farhad Manjoo, which point-by-point countered a number of Kennedy’s arguments.

(NOTE:  I provided links to those two articles mentioned here, I recommend anyone seriously interested in finding the truth read them.   I also recommend this article at Salon.com where Manjoo and Kennedy face off on the issue. LSU)

Manjoo, Hallett writes, "spent a year exhaustively studying the Ohio election rather than, a la Kennedy, dipping his toe into it 19 months later. Writes Manjoo, ‘If you do read Kennedy’s article, be prepared to machete your way through numerous errors of interpretation and his deliberate omission of key bits of data.’"

Of course, others have now critiqued Manjoo’s findings online.

Doug Clifton, editor of The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, said he had not read the Rolling Stone piece, but stressed that all of the arguments raised since the election have been properly reviewed. "We tracked down every allegation and we did as much checking as you can check," he said. "In the end, there were some problems, but they were not of the magnitude that would have made any difference."

Clifton also said any accusation that Ohio news outlets would purposely seek to hide a story about voter manipulation is "ludicrous on its face….These post-mortems seem to suggest that the press wants to supress a story on electoral fraud," he said. "It is sort of frustrating to keep hearing that."

Weiser of the Enquirer adds that Kennedy’s obvious Democratic leanings do not help the validity of his story. "If a major Republican was saying this, I might be paying more attention to it," he says.

That almost sounds like an accusation of partisan bias.   I am shocked, shocked I say….

"It was looked at quite a bit at the time," Washington Post veteran political reporter Dan Balz said Monday about the 2004 election. "The [Democratic National Committee] did a study and it concluded that there were irregularities, that there were not enough machines in some places and some confusion about ballots, but the Ohio newspapers seem to have investigated and did not conclude that this was necessarily partisan-inspired."

But Herbert wrote on Monday: "Kerry almost certainly would have won Ohio if all of his votes had been counted, and if all of the eligible voters who tried to vote for him had been allowed to cast their ballots….No one has been able to prove that the election in Ohio was hijacked. But whenever it is closely scrutinized, the range of problems and dirty tricks that come to light is shocking. What’s not shocking, of course, is that every glitch and every foul-up in Ohio, every arbitrary new rule and regulation, somehow favored Bush."

In the end this article by Kennedy more and more resembles a serious case of denial, with issues of transference, wishful thinking and blame shifting tossed in just for fun.

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