The quote below, by Andrew Gumbel of The Nation, actually did not surprise me, since I've been puzzling over his--and The Nation's--contemptuous dismissiveness for years. Ever since the last election, he and they have repetitiously asserted that there is "no evidence" of fraud by the Republicans: just old-fashioned dirty tricks and vast "incompetence," as Gumbel says (again) below.
The odd thing is that Gumbel's book, Steal This Vote, a history of election fraud in the US, is pretty good, except for the incoherent parts about Bush/Cheney's second "win." Odd also is the fact that Gumbel turns up as a talking head in David Earnhradt's excellent Uncounted. There he makes sound points about the e-voting machinery: points that he does not really believe, as is apparent in the bit below--and as I learned when I debated him in Berkeley in October of 2006. I write about that public conversation in detail on pp. 352-55 of the paperback edition of Fooled Again. As I reveal there, Gumbel made a number of false statements, suggesting that he really hadn't bothered studying the evidence that he was (and still is) laughing off. What matters here and now, however, is not just Andrew Gumbel's attitude, but why The Nation--particularly now--would take the same position on Republican election fraud as FOX News and the Weekly Standard. MCM Hi Mark, Ken Anderson's shakedown of von Spakovsky in A Tale Told by a Partisan Idiot is priceless. Thanks for sharing it. Maybe he'd consider next going after Andrew Gumbel, superficially one of ours, for his baseless trash talk below in "Protect This Election" (The Nation, Nov. 10 edition)? "The strange thing about this and the rest of the GOP attack machine is that somewhere along the way, the wheels started coming off. This is partly a result of straightforward political warfare: the groundwork laid by GOP operatives may be more extensive than in the past, but so are the campaigns to denounce their efforts, from the likes of Common Cause, the Century Foundation, the Brennan Center for Justice and other organizations that have issued report after report exposing the dirt and incompetence in the electoral system and calling the Republican's bluff on the supposed scourge of individual voter fraud. It certainly helps that the denunciations are now coming from well-known groups with serious academic credentials and a commitment to accurate research -- a welcome change from the days when hardworking but underqualified Internet campaigners were breathlessly denouncing nonexistent political plots cooked up by the Republicans and the makers of touch-screen voting machines." (http://www.alternet.org/election08/104369/how_safe_is_this_election/?page=entire) Ginny Ross --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to Mark Crispin Miller's "News From Underground" newsgroup. To unsubscribe, send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] OR go to http://groups.google.com/group/newsfromunderground and click on the "Unsubscribe or change membership" link in the yellow bar at the top of the page, then click the "Unsubscribe" button on the next page. For more News From Underground, visit http://markcrispinmiller.com -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
