Let’s Get Real
By Mark Crispin Miller
How better to commit the perfect crime than to insist it never happened?
Bush & company’s theft of the election was a crime so obvious that it requires more effort to deny than to affirm. This rip-off was as flagrant as the L.A. cops’ assault on Rodney King, Kerry’s stellar soldiering in Vietnam, or Bush’s lousy record in the Texas Air National Guard, and yet this national calamity is being dismissed as a delusion.
The reason for the Busheviks’ denial is as obvious as the theft itself: How better to commit the perfect crime than to insist it never happened?
And yet what makes this stance so dangerous is not just its use on the right, but its prevalence throughout the corporate media (MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann excepted) and even among those on the left. To charge that the Republicans did not legitimately rout the Democrats provokes the counter-charge that such claims “hurt the cause” by floating angry fantasy instead of scientific fact.
Rather than urge cautiousness, such automatic counter-claims quash all discussion of electoral fraud, as if the very notion were far-fetched. “This charge was false, so all charges must be wrong,” is the response that Karl Rove wants from us, as we will then conclude, conveniently for him, “Case closed!”
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/1692/