I'm my 40's, and have seen the rise and fall of various left wing conspiracy theories over the past two and a half decades, so I think it incumbant upon me to provide a bit of institutional memory to the Palast/caging debate.
Greg Palast claims to have several thousand names of voters illegally denied the right to vote. He says he is working with the BBC, and that basically we are a few weeks away from his blowing the lid off the Republican voter suppression movement.
I don't doubt for a minute that the Republicans tried to cage votes.
I also don't doubt that Bush avoided service in Vietnam, and then was a deserter while in the National guard.
But shoddy journalism helped Rove brilliantly defuse that issue and take it off the table during the election of 2004 by punking Dan Rather.
Palast's penchant for self promotion and grandious claims makes me suspect that his treatment of the caging issue will, in a similar way, do more damage than good.
Here's why...
There's a long history of left-wing journalism or legal activism that attempts to expose right-wing crimminality. Recently, there was Bev Harris at Black Box Voter, who got quite a bit of play by creating videos of a monkey hacking a diebolt voting machine. It looked really interesting, and she was all over Air America, and in particular Randi Rhodes. Bev, too, claimed to have all kinds of proof of hacked votes. But Bev proved to be unreliable and a flake, and Rhodes, (God bless her) excoriated her on the air for Bev's endless exagerations and fabrications.
Were the diebolt machines hacked? Probably. Perhaps, at the end of the day, Bev's work helped take the issue mainstream. But people like Bev Harris, way out of her depth and completely disorganized, helped put an end to serious inquiry into that issue.
Who remembers the October Surprise? Both Gary Sick and former Reagan White house staffer Barbara Honneger wrote books with that title. The story was that Reagan/Bush, through contacts with Iranians, delayed the release of the 50 American hostages and torpedoed Carter's re-election. Supposedly, GHWB flew to Paris to meet with the Iranians to negotiate. There was a former CIA, pilot, Richard Brenneke, who claimed to have flown GHWB to Paris. Later, the village voice reporter Frank Snepp destroyed Brenneke's claims by uncovering credit card receipts that showed Brenneke in the US when he claimed to be in Europe.
And of course there was the Christic Institute, who pushed the October Surprise story into the legal arena, with their theory of a "Secret Team". The case was thrown out. (The BBC did a lauditory documentary on the Christic Institute back in the day, I might add.)
My point is not that these conspiracies were false - I suspect them to be true. But the source was dubious, and we on the left should be more wary. Particularly when the source seems to put themselves in front of the story itself. Why doesn't Mr. Palast just release these emails to the Kos community? We could vette them, compile them, index them, and begin an open source investigation. Look what the Right wing managed to do with the "Rathergate" memo.
It is amazing what can be accomplished if you don't care who gets credit, Mr. Palast.
The messenger matters.
Cheers,
Petruk