Despite a national media blackoutno reviews in any major U.S. dailies or newsmagazines, no interviews on network TV or radio, or on NPR or PBSFooled Again eventually found a large readership through the Internet, C-SPAN, Air America, and broad local radio coverage.

This past June, the case against the Bush regime was expanded by three major works. Steve Freeman and Joel Bleifuss's Was the 2004 Election Stolen? devastates the fiction that the exit polls conducted on Election Day were wrong. Despite Freeman's scrupulous research, that book too went unreviewed. Greg Palast's Armed Madhouse dissects the huge fraud(s) whereby the Bush/Cheney ticket "won" New Mexico despite the strongly Democratic inclination of the state's Hispanic voters, who turned out in record numbers to dump Bush. (Somehow, over 17,000 of them cast no vote for president, according to the e-voting machines deployed in Democratic precincts.)

More noticeably, Rolling Stone ran Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s, comprehensive study of Ohio, "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?"a piece the media could not ignore because its author was too famous. Thus Kennedy appeared on some shows that had been closed to all us other analysts, although his piece relied explicitly on our research; and even he was treated like a fantasist, or a felon, by the likes of Neil Cavuto, Tucker Carlson, Wolf Blitzer and Charlie Rose. Aside from those interrogations (and a decent head-to-head with Stephen Colbert, who let him finish several sentences), Kennedy too was disrespected by the media, which either blacked him out or put him down.

In short, the awful truth about 2004 has been denied by right and left alikeand, strange to say, more loudly on the left. Indeed, whereas the right has largely chosen to avoid the issue, the only journalists who have purported to "debunk" the "theory" of Bush and Cheney's stolen re-election have been liberals and progressive (and, ordinarily, excellent reporters): Mark Hertsgaard at Mother Jones; Russ Baker at TomPaine.com; David Corn at The Nation; and, above all, Farhad Manjoo at Salon.

Their "refutations" of the case are largely based on the mere exculpatory say-so of a few unconscious (or complicit) Democrats. And yet, although the work of these debunkers has itself been thoroughly debunked (and Manjoo, therefore, quietly assigned to other topics), it has done much to propagate the myth that there's "no evidence" that Bush & Co. subverted our democracy. Such denials have been persuasive not because they are well argued but because the truth is terrifying, and a lot of people (including those reporters) very badly need a reason to believe that all is well. Such wishful thinking has kept "the liberal media" from dealing with the direst threat that our democracy has ever faced.

And yet most of our fellow citizens sense that threat. A Zogby poll in August found that only 45 percent of the American people felt "very confident" that Bush was re-elected "fair and square," while the rest either doubted it or were "not at all confident" about it. The numbers of the blithe have been decreasing as the people have learned more and more about BushCo's fascistic antics in 2004—and, as well, about the fatal flaws in the e-voting systems that the Republicans have been aggressively promoting since 2000. (Some Democrats have abetted them.)

The flaws of such systems have been exposed repeatedly by activists like Bev Harris, Brad Friedman, Clint Curtis, Lynn Landes, Earl Katz and Bruce O'Dell, and have also been solemnly detailed in many academic studiesfrom, among others, NYU's Brennan Center for Justice; Princeton's Center for IT Policy; RABA Technologies; SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation); the U.S. Government Accountability Office; and a cohort of computer scientists at Johns Hopkins, Rice and Stanford universities. (See previous issues of the Washington Spectator, here and here.)

Read together, all those exposés and studies tell of a close and wholly illegitimate relationship between the corporate vendors of those voting systems and Bush/Cheney's GOP. Three of the four firms that sell those systemsDiebold, ES&S and Hart InterCivichave tight links with the party. The fourth, Sequoia, has also tended to malfunction in Bush/Cheney's favor.

Now we have strong evidence of a covert partnership between those interests that "count" some four-fifths of U.S. votes and the party that controls our government. In a follow-up piece for Rolling Stone, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., quotes the shocking testimony of a Diebold whistle-blower who, along with other employees, took part in the surreptitious placement of a software "patch" in the company's machines in Georgia (whose electoral system had, just weeks before, been privatized through a secret contract with the Secretary of State). The order came directly from Bob Urosevich, president of Diebold's e-voting machine division. "We were told not to talk to county personnel about it," says Chris Hood, a consultant to the company. And what about that patch? "We were told that it was intended to fix the clock in the system, which it didn't do," Hood noted. "The curious thing is the very swift, covert way this was done."