Crossposted on
Dkos and
Truth 2 Power.
Although Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had an admirable performance on the Stephen Colbert Show last night, that one moment of exposure has been the exception rather than the rule since the publishing of his
Rolling Stone article on the 2004 election last friday.
Since then Kennedy has appeared on
Tucker Carlson, been
attacked by Salon and defended by the
Free Press, and then again in the
NYT Op-ed page, but most of the Corporate Media has remained silent on this issue. Besides the fact that this issues is the subject of
not one, but
two books currently on the shelves and the fact that the Cuyahoga County's own analysis
http://www.clevelandvotes.org/news/reports/Analyses_Full_Report.pdf&e=9797">strongly supports many of the factual arguements he makes, Kennedy has been largely treated as a pariah. The "blackout" is so complete that when if you attempt to
search for references to "Robert Kennedy" on Media Matters - you got nothing.
His coverage so far is so insignificant the right-wing isn't even bothering to smear him.
The most telling admission on this has come from a
card-carrying member of the "mainstream" media.
The blogosphere has been abuzz. But in the days since Rolling Stone magazine published a long piece that accused Republicans of widespread and intentional cheating that affected the outcome of the last presidential election, the silence in America's establishment media has been deafening. In terms of bad news judgment, this could turn out to be the 2006 equivalent of the infamous "Downing Street memo," the London Times story that was initially greeted by the U.S. media with a collective yawn.
Far from being a
conspiracy theorist, even this author had his own criticism and skeptism of the Kennedy article.
While Kennedy's article perhaps gives far too much weight to suspicious discrepancies between exit polls and the final election outcome, it meticulously asserts and documents questionable methods of purging voter rolls, intentionally created long lines at Democratic polling places, court-defying practices regarding registrations and provisional ballots, a phony terrorist alert on Election Day and final tallies in some counties and precincts that, to Kennedy's way of seeing it, simply don't make sense. Already, it notes, three Cleveland-area election officials have been indicted for illegally rigging the recount.
But if you were looking in the five or six days afterward for follow-up stories, investigations or even a mention in the P-I, its cross-town competitor or just about any other major U.S. newspaper, you were almost certainly disappointed. To his credit, CNN's Wolf Blitzer aired a brief and not-very-illuminating interview with Kennedy late the next day after the Rolling Stone issue hit the newsstands. There was a brief mention on the Lou Dobbs report later that same evening and MSNBC got around to mentioning the article's assertions several days later. But for the most part, national and regional newspapers, the major networks and news services have behaved as if the article was never published, that it broke no new ground and there was nothing of interest or significance in it.
I myself had fully expected RFK to receive the full "
Swiftboat treatment", but instead we get one aggressive interview with Carlson, followed by a fairly tame one by Colbert. Now what?
But an even more impressive blackout has been the one surrounding the
Vanity Fair Article on the "black propaganda" plot to falsify justifications for the Iraq War. That article details how the evidence that Iraq had attempted to purchase Uranium from Niger had been debunked at least 14 different times by various government agencies prior to the President's 2002 State of the Union address and the infamous "16-words".
Vanity Fair has found at least 14 instances prior to the 2003 State of the Union in which analysts at the C.I.A., the State Department, or other government agencies who had examined the Niger documents or reports about them raised serious doubts about their legitimacy—only to be rebuffed by Bush-administration officials who wanted to use the material. "They were just relentless," says Wilkerson, who later prepared Colin Powell's presentation before the United Nations General Assembly. "You would take it out and they would stick it back in. That was their favorite bureaucratic technique—ruthless relentlessness."
When and where these issues have been debated, which is largely on the blogosphere, the issue inevitably turns on the question of whether the suppression and modification of the vote in Ohio and the tragically mistaken intelligence which led us into the Iraq War were simply the result of
innocent mistakes or deliberate malfeasance.
"They didn't lie or cheat, they were just wrong."
It's almost as if the idea that being grossly incompetent is some type of legitimate defense for what has occured. Kennedy argues at that 325,000 people, largely Black Democrats who would have voted in the range of 80-90% for Kerry, were
systematically denied their oppurtunity to vote. Vanity Fair says that President Bush was told directly by as credible a source as Iraq Foreign Minister, Naji Sabri, that "Iraq has no WMD's" - yet he still went before the nation and proclaimed that we couldn't "take the chance" with Iraq and wait for the Inspectors for finish their work.
Even if these were "merely mistakes" they are the types of
mistakes that we simply can't afford and should be asked to tolerate. The "mistakes" of Ohio have kept in Office a President who has persued a fruitless and costly war under false pretenses.
To quote Comedian Lewis Black:
These guys fucked up on a massive level, and no one - no one is being held accountable. How is that possible? If you or I messed up like these fuckers, we'd be gone. What if I came out here and told you I'm not really a Comic - I'm a Magician. The I pulled out a rabbit out of my hat and just ripped off it's fur -- Close Enough Fuckers!!"
No, it's not close enough - not fucking nearly.
If we continue to let these types of stories go ignored, or marginized as merely "conspiratorial nutiness" we ignore the tangible impacts of these events. In all likelyhood, we have the wrong President and are engaged in the wrong War for the Wrong reasons.
Being wrong, this far wrong, is no excuse.
Vyan
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