Book review--Fooled Again

One of the blogs that I read regularly (dailyKos) has a moratorium on posts or comments concerning the possibility of election fraud in 2000, 2002, and 2004. The ostensible reasoning behind that restriction is that allowing that kind of conspiracy speculation might lend the blog an air of nuttiness that it is trying hard to overcome in its effort to provide the left a serious outlet for discussion. The plausibility of Mark Crispin Miller's Fooled Again, however, might give the Kossacks pause to reconsider that policy.
While not exactly providing a "smoking gun", Miller offers up the only kind of proof that we can have during the secretive years of Smirky's regime in support of his thesis that the right wing has been undermining our heritage of free elections for the last 5 years. Miller uses anecdotal and individual stories of disenfranchisement or threatened violence behind the scenes of our last 3 elections, but all of them are substantiated by the reportage of local sources with little to gain by lying. Nationwide instances of voter intimidation, ballot tampering and destruction, and the notorious and well documented use of "felon lists" by Republican Party workers fill Miller's book, making it virtually impossible to believe that these are simply isolated cases of unsupported wrongdoing by zealots.
Combining these stories with his very real fears (along with more anecdotes) that touch screen voting booths have been tampered with (something that is demonstrably possible) during these elections, and the fact that the manufacturers of those booths are rabid Republicans, Miller makes a believable, although completely "circumstantial", case that Smirky and his pals are rigging the system. Put briefly, Miller has put together too many disparate threads to ignore the existence of his tapestry.
Miller clearly has an axe to grind, but shouldn't we all? I imagine there are actually very few people in this country who are willing to "cheat" this severely, regardless of party affiliation or political persuasion. The problem is that we are all too eager to believe that none of them are running the country, which, if Miller is right, are exactly who are the cheaters. Those of us on the left have to wake up to this possibility immediately, since we are the ones bearing the ideological--and sometimes quite physical--brunt of this assault on our freedoms. (People on the right, having been on the winning side since 1994 (and especially since 2000, of course), have little motive to begin questioning their good fortune--who wants to know that s/he's been played for a chump by her/his own?) Unfortunately, unless someone who happens to be in the right position to know the truth and who also happens to be able to obtain physical proof recovers his/her moral and ethical balance and comes clean publicly, circumstantial evidence is all we can ask for from researchers like Miller. Let's hope that it's enough . . .