Democrat election lawyer Bob Bauer has left private practice and now works for the taxpayers as the Obama White House Counsel, and already there are discussions on the Left-wing blogs, encouraged by Bauer’s appointment, that statements such as "ACORN stole the election" for Obama in 2008 could be considered a form of harassment and voter intimidation in and of themselves and that to restrict such mistruths from further circulation they might best be criminalized.  Because, even though ACORN engaged in massive, coordinated vote illegalities in the last Presidential election, it didn’t really "steal" the election for Obama.   The drift on the Left is that Obama would have won the election without all the help, legal or illegal, ACORN provided anyway, so for people to say that Obama "stole" the election is near criminal slander, and it should be suppressed.  Lori Minnite, associated with Columbia University, states that tales of ACORN "stealing" the election for Obama are "ubiquitous" in the "rightwing blogosphere," and that rightwingers also believe that ACORN "stole" the election for Al Franken in Minnesota and for Democrat Bill Owens in the recent 23rd Congressional District special election in New York.

     To support her claims, Minnite cites a comment by a Herb London of New York state, a person involved in conservative politics there, who blogged, "It was once wrong to use community groups such as ACORN to steal an election."  I write for what Minnite might consider a "rightwing blog" on the subject of election law, and I for one don’t believe that ACORN actually "stole" the election for Obama.   I also don’t think London’s comment is more than rhetoric protected by the First Amendment.  He is not saying that ACORN literally "stole" an election.

     Though stealing elections can occur,  and history demonstrates that those who are most successful at it are often also interested in stifling free speech.  I am reading a fascinating new book this Thanksgiving holiday, a biography of Trotsky by Robert Service.   The book details how Lenin and Trotsky initially seized power in Petrograd in October 1917 by supplanting Kerensky’s Provisional Government with the Petrograd Soviet.  After losing the seat of his government with the Bolshevik storming of the Winter Palace, Kerensky made a brief show of force with his troops just outside the city, but lost a skirmish with armed Bolsheviks and dispersed.  Lenin promptly issued one of his first decrees: an order censoring the press from making "anti-Bolshevik" statements.  A few weeks later a nationwide election was held in Russia for a Constituent  Assembly, something Kerensky had in the works for months before and which the Bolsheviks could not yet derail.  The election result was not to the Reds liking.   Though they were a large party presence in the Assembly, they won only about 25% of the vote and could not govern without coalition.  So, instead, Lenin just kept issuing orders, censoring the press, and suppressing opposition parties.  His Soviets around the country began to fill the power gap, and when the Constituent Assembly actually met in January of 1918, armed Bolsheviks simply dispersed it (like Kerensky’s troops a few months earlier) and that was the end of democracy in Russia for about 75 years.

     Censorship in this country is never justified.  The Obama White House is not setup to issue decrees that limit free speech because the First Amendment of our Constitution does not allow that sort of thing.  It is OK for rightwingers to criticize Obama and ACORN.  And although it might not be literally true that ACORN stole an election (as did Lenin and Trotsky), it is still OK in this country for Herb London to say what he said.  And Lori, after hearing for eight years of the Bush Administration how Bush "stole" his own election, I think its time to cool it on the "speech police" angle.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 28th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.