RollingStone magazine is on a roll, hardy-har-har: First The Worst President in History? and now Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

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The article about the stolen election would have had a bit more credibility if it didn’t come from the same magazine that seriously ponders whether he was the worst preseident in US history. The Worst President article was silly to the point of being painful (as a historian, shouldn’t he have some basic notion of the context, particularly proximity to events, in which he is speaking and, knowing what he should, understand that our ultimate reckoning of Bush’s presidency, whatever it will eventually be, is likley to be a slowly evolving thing (people are still debating about Washington’s presidency, for god’s sake)). As for the other article, it was interesting, but I am less than convinced. He refers to the exit polls, and while those exit polls early in the day did seem to favor Kerry, these are famously slanted depending on the time of day gathered (the early exit polls generally pointed toward good tidings for Kerry but then, following a fairly predictable historical pattern, shifted in Bush’s direction). I have seen a couple of analyses of the voting looking for irregularities in light of, for instance, the final national and state polls taken on the eve of the election (for instance, there was that popular polling site run by the Princeton U. professor-I forget his name) that found no discrepancies large enough to evoke suspicion (which is not to say that no cheating occurred by either side).

Only two years later and they’re asking the hard-hitting questions.