Sunday, June 04, 2006
A Kennedy lies about voting fraud
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has quite famously jumped on the campaign to declare the 2004 election a fraud and to discredit American democracy. While one might be tempted to take RFKjr's charge seriously -- his uncle, after all, was elected president on the back of voting practices that would not, in all likelihood, have withstood the level of scrutiny we have all applied to the elections in 2000 and 2004 -- it was not a good sign that it was first debunked on National Public Radio (CWCID: Cassandra). If you can't get time on "All Things Distorted," you're not going to get any traction in the real world.
NPR's criticism, however, was nothing compared to the decapitation strike in Salon. Read the whole thing, and wonder whether you can ever again believe anything published in Rolling Stone.
UPDATE: The lefty Editors of The Poor Man Institute, who do know how to turn a phrase, note that RFKjr has made the Democrats look like idiots. More or less.
7 Comments:
By 
Admin, at
Sun Jun 04, 08:14:00 PM:
i have read it, and i wonder which facts in the article you take issue with.
By Grumpy Old Man, at
Sun Jun 04, 09:29:00 PM:
When I was in graduate school, our group visited Robert F. Kennedy in his office. Aside from kid drawings, he had a collection of Viet Cong improvised weapons in his office. I never liked him much, but he was a serious guy.
Robert Jr. is a wacko, environmental and otherwise.
By Cassandra, at
Mon Jun 05, 05:54:00 AM:
I spent a serious amount of time refuting the 2000 sElection charges in detail. It was obvious well before November 2004 that Kerry planned to raise a ruckus by proxy if he lost - he was already alleging election fraud well before the election and had retained a legal time so he'd be ready to go to court quickly if needed. He said this repeatedly in speeches.
Kudos to Salon for being willing to take on some of the loonier allegations. My prediction is that it will make little or no difference, however. People believe what they want to believe, facts be damned.
By Cassandra, at
Mon Jun 05, 05:54:00 AM:
grrr...legal team. Not awake yet.
By TigerHawk, at
Mon Jun 05, 06:15:00 AM:
Uptown, you read RFKjr's article, or the Salon article? Or both? Your question implies, at least, that you read only the former, and not the latter.
By 
, at
Mon Jun 05, 03:34:00 PM:
Well, if you only read the letters in response on
Salon's site, your "decapitation strike" would be
more along the lines of firing blanks.
Some rebuttals to Manjoo's article are available
here, and believe me they're more compelling,
and Manjoo is taken down a few notches.
By Assistant Village Idiot, at
Mon Jun 05, 10:54:00 PM:
Anonymous, I happened to save this link at the time, listing the accusations of voter fraud in 2004. You may notice a pattern...
http://billhobbs.com/hobbsonline/cat_voter_fraud.html
I think all the points brought forward in accusation were initially worth raising. As time goes on, the argument revolves around smaller and smaller possibilities. The idea that the exit polls were more correct than the votes is of course always a slim possibility in any election. Trust but verify, and all that. But the professional statistician on the site you lead to is very noncommital, allowing only the possibility of inaccuracy, not claiming there is evidence. The strongest other voice is one of the lawyers who challenged the election: "hey trust me, I'm a lawyer!" The offered evidence is weak. The main points seem to be 1) We think Bush and the Republicans are capable of it, and 2) voting machines can be tampered with. That's just not evidence of wrongdoing.
Wisconsin may have been stolen, BTW.
