The Columbus Dispatch is at it again. This time it’s Thomas Suddes on the Sunday October 12 Op-Ed page. Suddes sank to a new low even by Fourth Reich-style Dispatch rhetoric and propaganda standards. Suddes wrote: “To weigh Obama’s Ohio prospects, Al Gore’s 2000 tally might offer some hints, except to conspiracy freaks who know 2000’s vote-count was rigged by GOP munchkins in a Columbus basement. To paraphrase Groucho Marx, ‘When paranoia walks in the door, facts go innuendo.’”
The only one who has ever offered this conspiracy theory is Suddes himself. The Ph.D.s and professors at Penn and NYU who challenge Bush’s 2004 results have never questioned the 2000 election results in Ohio. Suddes knows this, but the he prefers that facts be banished from the room and door be barred.
Gore did not contest Ohio in 2000. Nor was the real-time apparatus linking the county boards of elections to ultra-partisan J. Kenneth Blackwell in place in 2000.
For Suddes to perpetrate conspiracy theory and attribute it to fact-based social scientists is an old trick perfected by Hitler’s co-horts and sycophants. It is a fact that Ohio’s real-time vote count was outsourced in 2004 to the old Pioneer Bank Building in Chattanooga, Tennessee. It is true that Smartech, the company that provided the servers at the Tennessee site, was hosting a who’s who of right-wing Republican political operatives from the swift-boaters to gwb43.com linked to the White House.
Suddes is offering the classic sleight of hand by forging and manufacturing absurd facts so he doesn’t have to deal with unpleasant realities. Suddes has to be regarded as a political operative, or paid political whore. Whichever one he is, history will record that it was bought and paid for journalists or brown-nosing hacks like Suddes who helped destroy American democracy.