Folks, I really want to put November 7, 2000, behind me but stuff keeps happening (and here). After spending nearly two years working on a documentary about the Florida election debacle, I thought I had atoned for being one of the few Americans who missed the TV drama (I went to sleep after Pennsylvania was called for Al Gore). Still, I have viewed so much footage from that night that I no longer know whether it was live or was it Memorex.
So, when James A. Baker (and here) was appointed co-chair of a commission that will make recommendations on how to fix what happened in the 2004 elections, I let it pass without commenting that the fox was guarding the henhouse. At some point you have to move on (which is different from forgetting what happened). But my feathers were ruffled when I saw the witness list for the commission’s first public hearing and noticed that John Fund was on the panel on “access and integrity.” Fund and integrity go together like, well, they don’t go together.
To recap: Fund had fun with the mother, decided he preferred it Woody-style and shacked up with the daughter, who later called the police and had him arrested (and here) for assault. As the New York Post reported:
Troubled Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund was arrested yesterday and charged with assaulting his ex-girlfriend, police said.
Fund, 46, had a stormy relationship with Morgan Pillsbury, the 27-year-old daughter of a former girlfriend, for more than two years before the couple broke up last month, police sources said.
Fund’s participation also rubbed Congressman John Conyers the wrong way:
The first meeting of the Baker-Carter election commission was disappointing and, at times, outrageous and tainted with racially-charged innuendo. Let me make absolutely clear that I greatly admire former President Jimmy Carter and believe he was insightful and on-target throughout the hearing. However, given the incredible lack of balance and profound lack of good faith demonstrated by some of Carter’s fellow commissioners and many of the witnesses at this hearing, at times he seemed to be a very lonely voice of sanity.
The remarks of Mr. James Baker, III, which were echoed by a number of right wing political operatives called as witnesses, seemed to have a singular purpose of spreading hoaxes and conspiracy theories about ineligible Democratic voters being allowed to cast votes. The remedy was cleverly repeated like a broken record, “photo ID, photo ID, photo ID.” Right wing pundit John Fund was called as an “expert” witness by the hearing and offered racially charged proposals with racially charged rhetoric.
The substance of the testimony alleging “voter fraud” was a fraud itself. One panel on “access and integrity” inexplicably included two partisan Republican political operatives, Colleen McAndrews (most recently a leader in the successful campaign to recall former California Governor Gray Davis and described as a “behind the scenes force in Republican politics for years”) and John Fund (of the notoriously far-right Wall Street Journal editorial page). Fund’s Wall Street Journal Editorial Page once promoted bizarre claims that then-First Lady Hillary Clinton had participated in a cover-up involving the death of former White House Counsel Vince Foster. Today, his hoax appears to have shifted to claims of “voter fraud” (though I am sure he would say Senator Clinton is responsible for that, as well). The remedy per Fund and McAndrews – restrictions on provisional ballots and new voter identification requirements.
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