It looks like Teresa Heinz Kerry is rubbing off on her husband. And on Sen. Hillary Clinton. For the Republican Party, this is a very good thing.
You'll recall that last month, Mrs. Heinz Kerry put on her shiniest tin-foil hat and blamed the Democrats' loss in November on rigged voting machines. As reported in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Mrs. Heinz Kerry openly questioned the election results and fixated on areas of the country where optical scanners were used to record votes. "Two brothers own 80 percent of the machines used in the United States," Mrs. Heinz Kerry intoned, and it is "very easy to hack into the mother machines." [Teresa Heinz Kerry hasn't lost her outspoken way, By Joel Connelly, March 7, 2005]
Cue the Close Encounters of the Third Kind soundtrack. And keep the mashed potatoes away from Mrs. Heinz Kerry.
Asked for evidence of her "mother machine"-hacking theory, the ketchup heiress refused further comment. Glitches happen. And no technology is fool-proof. But unhinged Democrats have obsessed on the fact that the chief executive of Diebold, the leading vote machine manufacturer, is a Bush supporter to turn inevitable errors into a nefarious Vote-Swallowing Grand Master Plan.
The mother machine theorists also cite the discrepancies between exit polls and vote tallies to bolster their suspicions. But as liberal journalist David Corn pointed out, "screwy exit polls do raise questions, but they are not proof of sabotage. And left-of-center accusers have promoted contradictory theories." On the one hand, they accuse Diebold and other vendors of "put[ting in the fix via the paperless touch-screen machines." On the other hand, they claim that conspirators in Florida rigged "optical-scan voting, not electronic touch-screen voting." Or is it both?
A Unified Mother and Father Machine Convergence Conspiracy?
Back on planet Earth, Corn notes that scholars at Cornell, Harvard and Stanford dismissed the Florida fraud allegations as "baseless." And the Voting Technology Project, a cooperative effort between the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found "no particular patterns" relating to voting systems and the final results.
Immediately after the election, John Kerry avoided the deepest fever swamps of the crackpot Left. But Teresa's kooky pillow-talk has apparently taken effect. On Sunday, Sen. Kerry dredged up allegations of Republican trickery and voter scare tactics in a speech before the League of Women Voters: ''Last year too many people were denied their right to vote, too many who tried to vote were intimidated.''
Kerry activists made much hay about the long lines and shortage of voting machines in swing districts. But their lawsuit in Ohio based on those claims was dismissed. And as Mark Niquette of the Columbus Dispatch told ABC's Nightline, "if you talk to the election officials here in Franklin County, they'll tell you, the main problem was there just weren't enough machines overall, that even Republican-leaning precincts had long lines."
Not a peep, by the way, from Kerry about the far loonier intimidation tactics of Democrats Gone Wild—from the drive-by shootings targeting GOP headquarters across the country, to the union mobs who stormed the offices of Bush/Cheney volunteers, to the anti-Bush thugs who burned swastikas onto Republican homeowners' lawns, to the paid Democratic staffers charged with slashing the tires of 20 Republican get-out-the-vote vans on Election Day.
Singing from the same hysteria-promoting hymn book in Minnesota this week, Sen. Hillary Clinton further stoked Democratic madness. Sarcastically praising the elections in Afghanistan and Iraq, Sen. Clinton pounced: "I believe that the right to vote and the obligation to count all the votes should be promoted not just in the Middle East, but in the Middle West! And in the Northeast! And in the Southeast! And in every. Corner. Of. The. United. States. Of. A-MEH-rica!"
The crowd went wild. Sen. Clinton continued: Too many minorities and college students have been "denied an equal right" to vote, she exclaimed. (Her "moderate" solution? An election reform bill that allows illegal aliens! And felons! And people without IDs to vote!)
The Democrats now seem to believe that the road to the White House is paved with paranoia. Well, let them keep babbling about "mother machines" and stolen votes. The evil genius Karl Rove himself couldn't have come up with a better plan.
Michelle Malkin [email her] is author of Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores. Click here for Peter Brimelow's review. Click here for Michelle Malkin's website.
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