Sickening

I have goosebumps and my heart is racing like rabbit's with outrage. I finally got around to reading Robert Kennedy's brillant, step-by-step reconstruction in Rolling Stone of how Republicans stole the 2004 election. It makes Watergate look like a little white lie. It's the biggest scandal in American history and the evidence was there all along staring people in the face but we just rolled over and chose another channel in our coma.

For example:

• In half of the 12 rural Ohio counties suspected of tampering with ballots, Bush outpolled the state's ban on same-sex unions by 16,132 votes. To trust the official tally, in other words, you must believe that thousands of rural Ohioans voted for both President Bush and gay marriage.
• When the ballots were counted, Kerry should have drawn far more votes than Ellen Connally -- a liberal black judge who supports gay rights and campaigned on a shoestring budget. And that's exactly what happened statewide: Kerry tallied 667,000 more votes for president than Connally did for chief justice, outpolling her by a margin of thirty-two percent. Yet in these 12 Bermuda Triangle counties, Connally somehow managed to outperform the best-funded Democrat in history, thumping Kerry by a grand total of 19,621 votes -- a margin of 10 percent.
• It goes on. Registration shredding, voter intimidation, stickers placed over votes for Kerry so optical scanners don't recognize them....

They blatantly stole it, like taking candy from millions of liberal babies. Can't have hurt that a majority of state election officials were LEGALLY on the payroll of the Bush re-election campaign. I can't fucking believe this. We have to do something. Anything.

Further research required.

Update: Salon's Farhad Manjoo dismantled Kennedy's article point by point, showing where he had glossed over contradictory evidence and misinterpreted statistics. It's also very persuasice My tiny brain is short-circuiting. The only cure is to interview Berkeley's resident election expert, I fear.