Infuriating, ignorant Chi Trib Editorial tries to Floridize Ohio theft [View All]

[Gabi Hayes]

this REALLY pissed me off today in the local fishtrainer:

If someone had told me 30 years ago that I would one day invoke Richard M. Nixon as a moral example, I'd have said the person was nuts. But that's what I'm about to do.

Legend has it that after the 1960 presidential election, an aide informed Nixon that there was enough evidence of irregularities in the results of the balloting in Illinois that a strong challenge to John F. Kennedy's victory here could be mounted.

To his credit, Nixon is said to have rejected a challenge as not worth putting the country through. In other words, winning wasn't the sole end of politics.

That Nixon legend came to mind this week as I opened what seemed the 1,000th e-mail in which the writer declared that the results of the 2004 presidential election are suspect and suggested that, instead of pursuing evidence of election theft and corruption, the Tribune and the rest of the "corporate media" are intent on ignoring the facts.

read on for the aggravating agitprop which follows
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0504280106apr28,0,5908365.column?coll=chi-ed_opinion_publiced-utl

where to begin with.... this jackass is ignoring the real facts about the 1960 Illinois situation. It's been revealed in myriad places, and this Slate article is as good a single retelling as one is likely to find without suffering carpal google syndrome:



contrast the following with what the egregious Tribhack said above:

....while Nixon publicly pooh-poohed a challenge, his allies did dispute the results—aggressively. The New York Herald Tribune's Earl Mazo, a friend and biographer of Nixon's, recounted a dozen-odd fishy incidents alleged by Republicans in Illinois and Texas. Largely due to Mazo's reporting, the charges gained wide acceptance.

But it wasn't just Mazo who made a stink. The press went into a brief frenzy in the weeks after the election. Most important, the Republican Party made a veritable crusade of undoing the results. Even if they ultimately failed, party leaders figured, they could taint Kennedy's victory, claim he had no mandate for his agenda, galvanize the rank and file, and have a winning issue for upcoming elections.

Three days after the election, party Chairman Sen. Thruston Morton launched bids for recounts and investigations in 11 states—an action that Democratic Sen. Henry Jackson attacked as a "fishing expedition." Eight days later, close Nixon aides, including Bob Finch and Len Hall, sent agents to conduct "field checks" in eight of those states. Peter Flanigan, another aide, encouraged the creation of a Nixon Recount Committee in Chicago. All the while, everyone claimed that Nixon knew nothing of these efforts—an implausible assertion that could only have been designed to help Nixon dodge the dreaded "sore loser" label.

The Republicans pressed their case doggedly. They succeeded in obtaining recounts, empanelling grand juries, and involving U.S. attorneys and the FBI. Appeals were heard, claims evaluated, evidence weighed. The New York Times considered the charges in a Nov. 26 editorial. (Its bold verdict: "It is now imperative that the results in each state be definitively settled by the time the electoral college meets.")

read on if you haven't heard the whole story yet....if you had, this sort of revisionism in the service of MOCKING the truth, just as they did in 2000/2001, makes me as angry as I've been for some time.http://slate.msn.com/id/91350/

I particularly like the bit in which Ralph de Toledano, a conservative writer/friend of Nixon, mentions catching him in his first (hahahahahaha) lie, WRT one of the central tenets of the big lie propagated concerning Nixon's reluctance to pursue an Illinois
challenge: Many others, chief among them Eisenhower, urged him to take action against the vote fraud in Illinois, as well as elsewhere, but he demurred, for the good of the country.

Back to the Trib--Wycliff goes on to say that the DEMS were resonsible for the low number of voting machines in heavily dem areas, and other such twaddle. Too bad he didn't take the time to lionize Blackwell in the same heavy-handed stroke.

Finally, does anybody know anything about his classic "authority figure," upon whom he rests his proposition? Never heard of him, but he's sure using one of the cornerstones of Propaganda 101 in bolstering his claim, rendered highly implausible by his complete hogwashy intro.