OH, THOSE KOOKS AND CRAZIES

When he got serious, Clarke recommended a slim book by various authors called "Defeating the Jihadists: A Blueprint for Action." You can buy it online (proceeds go to The Century Foundation, which just published it), or you can download it for free.

Also speaking last night was the freelance investigative reporter Greg Palast, who works for the BBC and who used to write a column for The Guardian in London (as one of George Orwell's successors). "There are kooks and crazies out there on the Internet who think Kerry won," he said, italicizing his remarks as in Oh my god! Palast is one of those maybe not-so-crazy kooks. And the reason, according to this self-described "mainstream guy," has to do with America's "apartheid ballot-counting system" in the last election.

Palast talks about the "spoiled" ballots in black communities in Ohio that were never counted as just the tip of the iceberg, a mere surface indication of Republican attempts to disenfranchise black voters through illegal manipulation and/or technical challenges. He said that after he and others brought this to light he received a letter from The New York Times asking if he was 1) "a conspiracy nut" and 2) "a sore loser."

I'm not sure whether Palast was serious when he mentioned the letter. But he was serious when he said the Times subsequently printed a story headlined "Internet Rumors ... Debunked." I recall that front-page piece. The online headline is "Vote Fraud Theories, Spread By Blogs, Are Quickly Buried." Here's the lede:

The e-mail messages and Web postings had all the twitchy cloak-and-dagger thrust of a Hollywood blockbuster. "Evidence mounts that the vote may have been hacked," trumpeted a headline on the Web site CommonDreams.org.

But the very untwitchy Palast emphasizes that the hacked votes in Ohio were not products of the high-tech "black boxes" vulnerable to hacking that everybody was suspcious of. The hacked votes were, in fact, the "spoiled" ballots produced by the lousy punchcard machines widely used in black voting districts, a distribution he believes was purposeful.

And it is these votes, Palast has written, "the uncounted ballots in Ohio -- more than a quarter million designated 'spoiled' or 'provisional' -- [that] undoubtedly contain[ed] enough votes to overturn George Bush's 'victory' margin of 136,000."