Matt Taibbi, political writer for New York Press and author of the campaign book “Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches from the Dumb Season,” writes wistfully about the Democratic party’s inability to pursue what he calls the 2004 “Ohio electoral scandal.” And then, to distinguish himself from those crude leftists who like to compare George W. Bush and the GOP to Hitler and the Nazis, Taibbi offers a more nuanced view:
In recent years it has been fashionable to compare these current Republicans with the Nazis and other totalitarian monsters. I’ve tended to resist those comparisons, but we’ve reached a point where it’s looking more and more appropriate to describe the neoconservative attitude toward the rule of law as having many things in common with those other revolutionaries. These neocons may not have the authoritarian bent of the German fascists or the Russian communists. They’re far more interesting in stealing and deregulating than in controlling, censoring and governing. But it is more and more clear that, like these other notorious movements, they view adherence to rules and to the law as a failure of will and a political weakness.
All of which makes it extremely important, according to Taibbi, to investigate Ohio:
That is why we in the media need to reexamine the 2004 election. If they really did steal it, we can’t just let it slide. Because they’ll do it again. And forget about the Democrats being able to do anything about it. They have their own problems.