Revisiting the Biggest Story of Our Lives

More than two weeks have passed since I first established here that a mountain of evidence suggests the 2004 Presidential election was decisively tampered with and general media are doing nothing about it. Needless to say, the response, pro and con, was overwhelming.

Among the most interesting observations were those of the large number of conservative critics who defined my position as "liberal". One website headquartered in Philadelphia called me "somewhere to the left of Leon Trotsky". That's fascinating. I had never realized the belief in free, full and fair elections was a socialist or communist tenet. I had thought it was a fundamental element of democracy.

Some of you are sympathetic, but feel like this is too long a shot. I'll remind you again that the truth of Watergate was still well-submerged at this point in 1973. But the New York Times and the Washington Post ultimately did their jobs back then. The Post showed its colors yesterday, moving a story about the vast disparity between pre-Iraq war military assessments and what the Bush Administration chose to tell the public from its original placing on page one to a main edition spot on page twenty-six. I don't think we can count on Katherine Graham to shepherd the truth anymore, and Ben Bradlee's gone. As for the Times, it is of course the constant target of the right-wing media conspiracy which labors so hard to cover the crimes of this Administration up. The Times will try, but it needs our help.

So here's another reading list for those of you who are willing to fight for democracy in America. You need to read Bob Koehler's work, which is suppressed by the editorial page of the Chicago Tribune. His seminal piece is "The Silent Scream of Numbers", which clearly makes the statistical case. His commentary on media silence is "Citizens in the Rain", which ponders whether media reform is a necessary corollary to election reform. His scariest observations are in "Democracy's Abu Ghraib", which asks the question, "if they can disable an election, what's next?". You need to know.

There are articles which go further toward establishing that John Kerry actually won the election. There are articles on the converse, on what kind of mental gymnastics it takes to actually believe Bush won despite what time-honored research techniques proved. There are the hard numbers from the final exit polls, which didn't lie. The lie was the "official" result.

The cretins in the Bush Administration are no doubt thrilled to have made Amnesty International's select list of human rights abusers. They're actually being cited there for some of their smaller crimes. The biggest one was domestic, not international. It's the one you are reading about, if you care. I pray to all the traditions of democracy that you do.