This is what a lot of conservatives are going to be telling themselves after election day: That Obama cheated, that the media cheated, that McCain wasn't a conservative anyway, and that the only reason Sarah Palin wasn't a hit with swing voters is that the press - with an assist from conservative quislings like Frum and Brooks and Parker and Noonan - poisoned the well. And in such thinking lies the seeds of years or even decades of defeat.
I took a lot of flack from my own side in late 2004 (or was it early 2005?) when I purged this site of those I called "fraudsters" -- people who blamed our 2004 loss on voting machines and other Republican trickery. While there was systemic disenfranchisement of our voters in key states (like Ken Blackwell's Ohio), no Diebold trickery was needed to steal that election. Yet the obsession on those conspiracy theories by too many detracted from the true reform our party needed to undertake before it could win again.
My take? This is hatchet-think when we need a scalpel. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. Plus, Howard Dean was going to launch his 50-state strategy, with or without the help of 50 or 100 or 200 DKos diarists and their commenters and readers.
More fundamentally, the issues raised by the majority of "fraudsters" (myself among them) were not limited to claims that Kerry won, but touched on a variety of issues that even now have yet to be robustly addressed. Indeed, some never even claimed that Kerry won at all. Other issues included voters rights, election integrity, Democrats standing up to GOP bullying and criminality, and Kerry breaking his word about fighting to see that every vote would be counted. Georgia10 did a marvelous job of continually summarizing developments and articulating concerns, and her work alone was sufficient to demonstrate the complexity that Kos's mischaracterization seeks to erase. Additionally, I wrote a diary "OHIO & Lakoff: The Right Wing Power Grab Frame" in which I wrote:
What matters to me most about Ohio are 3 things: (1) Racism. (2) Voter Suppression. (3) The Right Wing Power Grab.
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