So, you're all screaming about how anybody who asks for some solid evidence of voting fraud is a closet neo-con? That there's a "lockdown" of the "MSM" about voting irregularities, and Keith Olbermann is your soon-to-be concrete-shod knight in shining armor?
Well, congratulations, fuckers, you've about worn out his patience:
More than one kind of black box
...
I don't think Bev Harris of Black Box Voting is doing anybody any favors.
I suggested as much tonight on Countdown and there were a lot of understandably surprised emails. Some profane, incidentally, which had previously been the exclusive province of those who notified me of their opposition to anybody covering anything about voting irregularities or especially Jesse Jackson's F-Word.
Each and every day since our coverage of all this began on November 8, I have received a set of emails, some times a few, some times many, asking "Why don't you have Bev Harris on Countdown?," "Why don't you run the Bev Harris videotapes?," "Why don't you show the voting tapes Bev Harris found discarded in the trash in Florida?"
Because she won't let us.
I have not dealt with Ms. Harris directly, but my staff has, and though we have asked her on a regular basis to let us show these tapes on national television, she has declined.
We are running in risky waters as it is, offering a platform for tapes we can't independently verify. But I have heretofore been convinced that she had credentials sufficient to make an interview segment with her both useful and reasonable.
My ample gut has lately sent me a different message, and her showdown with Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore on Monday seemed to buttress my instinct. She burst into LePore's retirement ceremony, her cameraman rolling tape as she did so, and she raced to the podium to announce to the shocked room full of supervisors that she was "serving" LePore with papers as part of her lawsuits over what she claims are LePore's evasions in providing records of the 2004 vote....
Congratulations, y'all. You've made the one honest newsman telling this story to a nationwide audience look like an asshole. Almost.
Olbermann started covering voting irregularities before the election, giving tons of time to the Sproul Associates/fake voter registration story (not to mention the fact that Dan Abrams went off on such violations of democracy, comparing them to treason).
He was first out of the box pulling together the reporting from local and regional papers about voting irregularities. He dragged his colleagues on the air and put them on the spot, asking them why the hell the story hadn't been picked up yet, and got answers that might have been unsatisfying, but were entirely plausible—unless you think all reporters are soulless automatons.
But noooooooooooo! That wasn't good enough! There was a huge conspiracy! There was fraud! And it was entirely necessary for you to scream about it at such volume that anyone attempting to compile plausible evidence must be drowned out, because they just weren't screaming enough!!!!!
So now all the reporters who might have taken it seriously are shaking their heads, and the rest are chuckling in public about Those Wacky Bloggers. Ni-i-i-ice.
Who the hell are you people, anyway? If I didn't know better, I'd think y'all were moles. With all your blogger triumphalism and flat-out bullshit, you sound like the clownholes at Little Green Snotballs taking personal responsibility for Dan Rather's resignation.
Will your shrieking inspire a groundswell of support for Rush Holt's voting reform bill? Hell, do y'all even know who Rush Holt is? Doubt it.
Update [2004-12-2 2:5:35 by hamletta]: Apparently, some people haven't read the link, so here's another tidbit:
I don’t know her motivations and I don’t know her bona fides. But I’m afraid at this stage, intentionally or by the simplest of communication failures, she isn’t helping illuminate this issue. And every step that attracts heat but not light is another step towards discrediting the entire process.