Read a Pacific Northwest, liberal perspective on world, national, and local politics. From majestic Redmond, Washington - the Northwest Progressive Institute Official Blog.

Monday, May 21, 2007

McKay says stuff

So John McKay had some stuff to say over the weekend at the "Mainstream Republicans" convention. From the P-I:
He referred dismissively to "cybercowards," apparently meaning conservative bloggers who have criticized the lack of prosecution, and scorned the purported evidence of election fraud alleged by Tom McCabe, the aggressive, conservative executive vice president of the Building Association of Washington and a Rossi supporter.

McKay said he, four other federal prosecutors and a number of FBI agents conducted an exhaustive investigation of McCabe's complaint. He said McCabe's allegation that he, McKay, "failed to follow this up is utterly false and he knows it."

McKay said the evidence McCabe presented was "a joke from an evidentiary standpoint that a crime had been committed. ... Every FBI agent who looked at the evidence and every federal prosecutor who looked at the evidence that the BIAW sent in concluded that it was completely, utterly insufficient to move forward in an investigation."
If you go read the whole article, you'll see that McKay also said the 2004 election "smelled bad." Which, you know, it did, on a whole number of levels.

One thing that people up in the Puget Sound region might want to keep in mind is that certain "cybercowards," as McKay called them, spurred attacks not just on Dean Logan and King County Elections, but on public servants in other counties, like Greg Kimsey, the Clark County auditor. Kimsey is one of the most honest and dedicated public servants around, so to put it mildly those attacks were pretty darn low.

It was a state-wide attempt to create a media firestorm, and in many ways it did.

The narrative that was presented outside the Puget Sound area was that mafia-type Democrats out and out stole the election, and that is the narrative that is still being presented in certain conservative circles, with supporting publicity (at times) from the traditional media. It's a ridiculous and utterly false narrative, as all the actual evidence (or lack thereof) has shown, but both the "cybercowards" and (at times) the traditional media just can't seem to help themselves.

To this day, Republicans insist on saying things like "Dino Rossi won the election twice, but he had to win it three times," which is very disingenuous. It was a recount process, under the laws of the state, and they know it.

If anyone says they have evidence of conspiratorial acts, then they should, as McKay suggested, go present it to the proper authorities. Failure to do so immediately should be seen, properly, by the traditional media as an admission that no real evidence actually exists.

My crystal ball needs an oil change, but for my money I'd guess things would ultimately turn out about the same as before -- the election was razor thin and compounded by errors.

All this being said, it's encouraging to hear that some Republicans will applaud a man like McKay, who obviously has a strong sense of duty and ethics. We hasten to add that we would probably disagree with him on a whole ton of stuff, but we can respect folks like John McKay, even if we probably wouldn't vote for him.

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