Something’s Rotten in the State of Ohio

There are a lot of rotten states around, including the state of mind of Tom Delay, or any Democrat who voted for the bankruptcy bill.
Or the crooked results of last year’s presidential voting in the state of Ohio. Erudite writer for Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens, happened to be in Ohio at the time of the election, and he wrote a piece dissecting the questions and possible answers of just how on the big fix was. Here’s how perplexed Hitchens became the more he looked:

“Whichever way you shake it, or hold it to the light, there is something about the Ohio election that refuses to add up. The sheer number of irregularities compelled a formal recount, which was completed in late December and which came out much the same as the original one, with 176 fewer votes for George Bush. But this was a meaningless exercise in reassurance, since there is simply no means
of checking, for example, how many “vote hops” the computerized machines might have performed unnoticed.”

Hitchens' article is an exercise in frustration, at the amount of chicanery going on and being gotten away with. I was reading some of the letters in the current issue of Vanity Fair about Hitchens’ article, and one idea really got me upset, not that it was a bad idea, but that I had not been more upset about it before. The letter-writer, Arthur Kingdom III, says,

“But while stories of election improprieties in Ohio have been circulating since the election, I certainly don’t see the Justice Department launching an investigation. However, when someone of the stature and mind-set of Mr. Hitchens calmly and astutely raises pertinent questions about Ohio, it gives us some hope. This really is a big deal…”

It really is a big deal, and after some initial attention given by Keith Olberman in his blog for MSNBC.com, the media have dropped this story, and so have the dozens of lawyers and democrats who were getting on a band wagon to stir up some action. Granted there was a brave, bold move by Senator Barbara Boxer of California and others, to have the Ohio voting results not certified as the formality is required by congress. That attempt failed and even the notice it brought to the Ohio vote problem was not enough to cause further inquiry by any entity.

So, as Mr. Kingdom says, the manipulated voting results in Ohio, which determined the ultimate winner of the US Presidential election, are a “big deal,” and here I sit wondering who’s doing anything about it. That’s what’s really upsetting.