Wednesday Morning Politics

Here I sit at my regular perch in Serious Coffee whiling away the morning writing, emailing, and playing online sudoku. I've been surfing some new blogs lately - their links can be found on the right - which brings me to my first point of interest of the day. Was the 2004 Presidential Election stolen and do we really care now that it's 2006?

Yesterday I was reading this article in Rolling Stone about it. Ok, ok. I don't generally get my political commentary from Rolling Stone, but I read it anyway and found it interesting. It brings a number of statistical anomalies to light and points to the fact that , yes, there was a determined effort on the part of the Republican Party to ensure its candidate's victory. The article lost me, however, when they started quoting Rep. John Conyers (D-MI). There are few Congressmen/women for whom I have less respect. He makes rambling, incoherent speeches, reportedly treats his staff like his personal servants, and has done his part in his twenty terms in office to keep the city of Detroit in squalor. I think they could've found a better, more reliable source. I stopped reading at this point.

There is reportedly a rebuttal here, but I haven't read it. The thought that has remained with me is "do we really care?". I'll be the first to admit that I think President Bush has done a crappy job running our country. I also believe that the 2000 Presidential Election was a farce. But, at this point in mid-2006, I don't think it matters anymore. What do people expect Congress to do, overturn the election results now? Why is this still being investigated?

Democrats would be wise to remember the 1960 Presidential Election where Mayor Daly of Chicago mobilized the cities corpses to vote for John F. Kennedy. Should we overturn those results retroactively even though both men in question are now dead? Where would it end?

Politics is dirty. You can believe all you want that Republicans are more moral than Democrats, but until you've been inside a major political election, you have no idea what happens. I worked on the campaign of Howard Dean in 2003 before he lost in the primaries. While I didn't personally witness any wrong-doing, I can imagine that it could easily occur. Picture this, the Republican Party is in control of the Secretary of State's office in a critical Midwestern state (more another time on why the Secretary of State post should be non-partisan). Thousands of voter registration forms flood into the office in the months before elections. How easy would it be to knock a pile off a desk and into the trash (or into the shredder)? Pretty easy. And people concerned with maintaining a hold on power, no matter what their party, would do it.

I guess the moral of the story is this: leave this election b.s. alone. Politics is dirty and will always be dirty. Every county in this country prints its own ballots and processes them in its own way. If Congress really wants to address this issue, ignore the states-rights people and come up with a national ballot for federal elections and a national way of processing/counting those ballots. I won't hold my breath while I wait for it, though.