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by Bob Fitrakis
June 29, 2006
Having just watched the premier of Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,”
I couldn’t help but see the parallels between the global warming issue and the 2004 stolen presidential election. Gore related his attempts over the years to get Congress, the media and the public to believe that global warming is a crisis, only to be derided and discredited. Those of us who expose stolen elections often receive the same reaction – mostly from the media.
I had the privilege of seeing Vice President Gore’s presentation live at the Ohio State University on April 16, 2004. So it was no surprise when I heard theatergoers gasp as Gore presented the scientific evidence for global warming. The charts, the graphs, the pictures – all make a clear and convincing case.
My forthcoming book, with co-editors Harvey Wasserman and Steve Rosenfeld entitled What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election (New Press), attempts to put the issue of Ohio’s 2004 election in a similar light.
Mark Crispin Miller recently wrote in his open letter entitled “Some Might Call it Treason,” to Farhad Manjoo, an election theft “denialist” on salon.com, that when “extremely bright” people refuse to consider the possibility of a stolen election, it is often the result of “a subtler kind of incapacity: a refusal and/or inability to face a deeply terrifying truth.”
Part of the appeal of Gore’s quest in “An Inconvenient Truth” is that he also knows we have convenient and ready technology to turn around the terrifying horror of global warming – reducing the use of fossil fuels and carbon emissions into the atmosphere. Those in the petroleum industry who have a vested interest in producing the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming realize that all they have to do is call him names such as “eco-kook” or muddy the water by paying some pseudo-scientific de-bunker to assert the opposite.
The same is true in election rigging. Those who do the hard work of the public records requests, ballot counting and number crunching are dismissed out of hand as “conspiracy theorists” by Republican spin doctors. Even worse, self-proclaimed progressive and left publications like Mother Jones and salon.com join the fray and denounce those seeking the truth with such terrible words as “leftists” and “activists.”
The irony of the Free Press being attacked by Mother Jones magazine, a magazine that willfully embraces the name of one of America’s greatest leftist activists, is beyond belief.
Bobby Kennedy spent half a year or more investigating the stolen election with a slew of Ph.D.s like Richard Hayes Phillips, Ron Baiman, Steve Freemen, myself and Mark Crispin Miller – and salon.com dredges up a blogger with a bachelor’s degree to rebut the argument with one day’s investigation. Doesn’t honesty and integrity require the de-bunkers actually look at the data produced?
I was shocked when Mother Jones journalist Mark Hertzgaard told Free Press Senior Editor Harvey Wasserman that I was wrong on the election theft because he made a few phone calls to election officials in Ohio from his mansion in the Bay area. He came to his conclusion without first ever talking to me or looking at any data. Farhad Manjoo of salon.com adopted a similar tactic in simply refusing to look at the mountains of evidence in the public record produced by a year and a half investigation by award-winning journalists.
While one would expect the likes of Sean Hannity to dismiss myself and others as “idiots,” historically there’s been a higher standard among progressive intellectual journals and magazines. I’m a big fan of open debate and the production of actual documents and would be more than willing to debate Hertzgaard, Manjoo or any others before an inquiring audience.
Through sheer dogged determination, Al Gore manages to convince skeptics all over the world that global warming is a problem, and one that needs to be solved. The problem with most of the progressive de-bunkers of election theft is that they don’t trust the people to solve the problem. But just like the ending of “An Inconvenient Truth” when Gore spells out the technology available for resolving the climate crisis that we fear, we also have readily available technology to stop election theft.
It’s called paper and pencil.
Ninety-five percent of all the democracies on Earth have figured this out. Thus, there’s still hope for Mother Jones, salon.com and frightened progressives everywhere.
I had the privilege of seeing Vice President Gore’s presentation live at the Ohio State University on April 16, 2004. So it was no surprise when I heard theatergoers gasp as Gore presented the scientific evidence for global warming. The charts, the graphs, the pictures – all make a clear and convincing case.
My forthcoming book, with co-editors Harvey Wasserman and Steve Rosenfeld entitled What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election (New Press), attempts to put the issue of Ohio’s 2004 election in a similar light.
Mark Crispin Miller recently wrote in his open letter entitled “Some Might Call it Treason,” to Farhad Manjoo, an election theft “denialist” on salon.com, that when “extremely bright” people refuse to consider the possibility of a stolen election, it is often the result of “a subtler kind of incapacity: a refusal and/or inability to face a deeply terrifying truth.”
Part of the appeal of Gore’s quest in “An Inconvenient Truth” is that he also knows we have convenient and ready technology to turn around the terrifying horror of global warming – reducing the use of fossil fuels and carbon emissions into the atmosphere. Those in the petroleum industry who have a vested interest in producing the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming realize that all they have to do is call him names such as “eco-kook” or muddy the water by paying some pseudo-scientific de-bunker to assert the opposite.
The same is true in election rigging. Those who do the hard work of the public records requests, ballot counting and number crunching are dismissed out of hand as “conspiracy theorists” by Republican spin doctors. Even worse, self-proclaimed progressive and left publications like Mother Jones and salon.com join the fray and denounce those seeking the truth with such terrible words as “leftists” and “activists.”
The irony of the Free Press being attacked by Mother Jones magazine, a magazine that willfully embraces the name of one of America’s greatest leftist activists, is beyond belief.
Bobby Kennedy spent half a year or more investigating the stolen election with a slew of Ph.D.s like Richard Hayes Phillips, Ron Baiman, Steve Freemen, myself and Mark Crispin Miller – and salon.com dredges up a blogger with a bachelor’s degree to rebut the argument with one day’s investigation. Doesn’t honesty and integrity require the de-bunkers actually look at the data produced?
I was shocked when Mother Jones journalist Mark Hertzgaard told Free Press Senior Editor Harvey Wasserman that I was wrong on the election theft because he made a few phone calls to election officials in Ohio from his mansion in the Bay area. He came to his conclusion without first ever talking to me or looking at any data. Farhad Manjoo of salon.com adopted a similar tactic in simply refusing to look at the mountains of evidence in the public record produced by a year and a half investigation by award-winning journalists.
While one would expect the likes of Sean Hannity to dismiss myself and others as “idiots,” historically there’s been a higher standard among progressive intellectual journals and magazines. I’m a big fan of open debate and the production of actual documents and would be more than willing to debate Hertzgaard, Manjoo or any others before an inquiring audience.
Through sheer dogged determination, Al Gore manages to convince skeptics all over the world that global warming is a problem, and one that needs to be solved. The problem with most of the progressive de-bunkers of election theft is that they don’t trust the people to solve the problem. But just like the ending of “An Inconvenient Truth” when Gore spells out the technology available for resolving the climate crisis that we fear, we also have readily available technology to stop election theft.
It’s called paper and pencil.
Ninety-five percent of all the democracies on Earth have figured this out. Thus, there’s still hope for Mother Jones, salon.com and frightened progressives everywhere.