AN inspired voyage back onto the Memory Lane of election corruption inspired by a Grey Lady op ed on "plagiarism."

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Every once in a while I treat myself to a good read of the New York Times, as opposed to a scan or quick read of articles that jump out at me. Many of these, unsurprisingly, concern election integrity, since I am on their list to automatically receive relevant articles.

Today Gail Collins published a somewhat tongue-in-cheek op ed "Rules to Vote By," criticizing the plagiarism of policy solutions offered by various candidates for the 2014 elections. I wrote a reply that defended the borrowing of ideas from others as long as the originators were given credit, but what if the idea came from Singapore instead of Thomas Jefferson?

Inevitable controversy, usually the lifeblood of democracy, some believe, but lately I think most of us will agree that it's a bit stretched when Congress receives a popularity rating lower than that for cockroaches (9 percent, the last I heard, for Congress, that is). "deathblood of democracy" it seems, these days.

Then, because I believe that comments on articles are sometimes even better or more interesting than the articles themselves, though I have even less time to peruse them, I opted for the New York Times's favorite comment on Collins's op ed, most articulately written. It stated that those to blame are not the plagiarizers but those who never read about them--the "men on the street" who [I am paraphrasing] don't know the difference between Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell but vote anyway.

Theirs is the blame, she wrote. Blame the people.

So I swallowed hard to talk back to a Grey Lady fave but did. I wrote that she was correct in implicitly emphasizing the importance of an informed electorate, but instead of blaming the uninformed--she even bluntly faulted them--she needed to dig deeper and ask "why" once she thinks to have pinpointed "whom."

And what of the plus-or-minus 100 million or so who don't vote at all?

I told her about the Election Integrity's emphasis on the importance of educating the people via many forms of outreach. You don't just blame and stop there to applause from Times editors as well as even some readers. One said that she should be on the editorial board herself. )-:

That had been the only editors' pick. Suddenly several more popped up. I was glad, because usually the editors choose better.

Disclaimer: The Times has provided the [educated] public with important information on election and voting issues and I often quote from the Grey Lady herself in my writing.

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Just as a quick segue, the "plagiarizer" whom Collins cited is the Georgia candidate for the U.S. Senate David Perdue, who "plagiarized" a proposed economic policy from Lee Kuan Yew, the ex-prime minister of Singapore. Perdue's staff should have rewritten it, the usual procedure, wrote Collins. "It's sort of weird when you adopt precepts from a guy who used to have citizens beaten with canes for vandalism."

Now David Perdue is the first cousin of former Georgia [Republican] Governor George Ervin "Sonny" Perdue III, who in Election 2002 triumphed against his opponent Roy Barnes even though Barnes had been ahead in the polls by 11 percentage points. Overnight, Perdue forged ahead by sixteen points, winning the election by 51 percent and thus becoming the first Republican governor of Georgia since the Reconstruction.

Collins didn't add that information, nor write about David Perdue's opponent, the incumbent Saxby Chambliss, who originally got into office in that same 2002 election in Georgia by defeating the popular incumbent U.S. Representative Max Cleland, an Iraq war veteran who lost three limbs while fighting for his country's foreign policy of the time. Cleland's pre-election poll totals exceeded Chambliss's by 5 points, but then, courtesy of another good-old "overnight surprise," Chambliss somehow surged ahead to a 53 percent upset.

Recall that Georgia was one of the first states to adopt Direct Recording Election (DRE) machinery prior to the passage of HAVA in late 2002. DRE totals cannot be audited or recounted, both actions that might have affected the results as long as tampering was not involved. But the suspicion is that it was. DREs are also completely tamperable, notoriously so.

Now Chambliss since then was elected U.S. Senator from Georgia, so people cared even less, or were even less informed than they should have been. Where was the press? That's how I got into the Election Integrity movement in the first place--by attending a rally protesting press's lack of attention to election corruption scandals--Florida 2000 at that point.

The scoop on our current Secretary of Defense, former Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel goes back even farther and is also rooted in election corruption, alas. I may be one of the few people in this country who guessed why Hagel did so badly during his Senate confirmation hearings--called by the Guardian "an embarrassment for all concerned."

Did the mainstream press wonder why he had done so badly?

This is my theory: He didn't want it.

I surmised the reason: he had a skeleton in his closet. He was a former chairman of and shareholder in the Nebraska election machine manufacturer Electronic Systems and Software (ES&S), largest of its kind, at the time, in the U.S. He claimed to have stepped down from this position to run successfully for the Senate [R-NE] in 1996 and then won again in 2002, beating a popular former governor of the Cornhusker State by the largest margin in the state's history--including a huge number of votes he amassed from all-black precincts.

Most votes in Nebraska were counted by ES&S machinery, by the way.

In 2003 pioneer election integrity activist Bev Harris and others complained to the chairman of the Senate Ethics Committee about Hagel's questionable victories given his former close affiliation with the king (at the time) of election machinery manufacturers.

The chairman took the rap and stepped down. Hagel did not run for reelection in 2008 and resumed his private life. I don't know if he resumed his ES&S affiliation. So with this scandal on the records of the Senate Ethics Committee (I hope), no wonder he did not seem too happy to join President Obama's cabinet in 2013.

So I thought. And since then, this country has gone to war on numerous fronts. What power. I have this much to say for Hagel. He was neither the first nor the last politician to have assumed such important offices under such questionable circumstances. Another was the war president Lyndon Baines Johnson (nicknamed "Landslide Lyndon" when he first won a seat in the House in 1946, I believe, because of the slender margin of victory that put him in office), who escalated the Vietnam war to such tragic consequences and ultimate defeat. But he also gave this country Medicare, Medicaid, the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act.

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And so, to lend circularity to this article, let's go back and remember how I got onto this long tangent--longer than the article I sat down to write.

It was Gail Collins's mention of U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, simply in passing, as the incumbent Senator against whom David Perdue, her focus, is running in Georgia. Collins doesn't delve into Chambliss's rise from obscurity to become a U.S. Senator. Then, speaking of promotions from questionable elections to positions of crucial power in the U.S. government, I climbed up to President Obama's cabinet to find a situation infinitely more execrable than plagiarizing a workable economic policy from a leader whose deeds in other realms were called execrable [not a direct quote] by the Times.

Let's say "emulate" instead of "plagiarize," since the credit was belatedly restored to its source. But how many of those who will vote for U.S. Senator in Georgia this November read the New York Times anyway? Collins is more interested in politicians' gaffes than in spreading the word about Perdue's plagiarism or discussing other, more serious wrongdoings. Sen. Chambliss will probably win again, he of the meteoric rise out of DRE malfunction or tampering.

If we all have skeletons in our closet--and President Obama's is his current Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, a patroness way back when, according to Greg Palast--I must say that some skeletons are scarier than others.

That highly educated Times editors' favorite commenter today who blamed our problems on the uneducated was pretty scary, but perhaps ignorant of the Powell memo that planned to dumb enough of us down so that, so that, uh . . . .

An early Happy Halloween to you all. What a den of monsters have risen to the top of our society, far fewer than the innocent ones who will trick or treat at the end of this month. There are those who dress as monsters once a year and others wearing three-piece suits for whom every day is Halloween's inverse, trick and treat, and would that this bad paradox stopped here, at the level of writing rather than reality.

There--I've done it, over the heads of Chambliss and Hegel to the top .5 percent.

(Article changed on October 9, 2014 at 15:43)

(Article changed on October 9, 2014 at 19:34)

(Article changed on October 9, 2014 at 20:01)

Authors Website: http://www.wordsunltd.com

Authors Bio:

Marta Steele is an author/editor/blogger who has been writing for Opednews.com since 2006. She is also author of the 2012 book "Grassroots, Geeks, Pros, and Pols: The Election Integrity Movement's Nonstop Battle to Win Back the People's Vote, 2000-2008" (Columbus, Free Press) and a member of the Election Integrity movement since 2001. Her original website, WordsUnLtd.com, first entered the blogosphere in 2003. She recently became a senior editor for Opednews.com. She has in the past taught college and worked as a full-time as well as freelance reporter. She has been a peace and election integrity activist since 1999. Her undergraduate and graduate educational background are in Spanish, classical philology, and historical and comparative linguistics. Her biography is most recently listed in "Who's Who in America" 2019 and in 2018 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Who's Who.