No! No!

Okay, this is it. We're screwed. It's over. November has just been declared meaningless no matter the outcome.

You may have already heard the news about the outfit called Voters Outreach of America. That's the RNC-financed gang that hired people to do voter registration in Nevada - and which was caught red-handed by one of its canvassers destroying the voter registration forms of people who were registering as Democrats.

The canvasser (his name is Eric Russell, apparently an honest man deserving to be celebrated as such) gathered the proof - torn-up forms he retrieved from the trash - and brought it to a local TV station, which did a couple of stories about it. This lead to a suit by the local Democratic Party, seeking to have the time period for voter registration extended so that those people who were wrongfully denied their franchise by this fraud would have the chance to register.

I'll let the TV station, KLAS-TV of Las Vegas, pick up the story from Friday.

This morning, [District Court] Judge Valerie Adair basically accepted as fact that voter registration forms had been destroyed by someone and that an unknown number of voters were in danger of being disenfranchised as a result. But by Friday afternoon, it was a much different story.

Judge Adair had told the two parties in the case - the Democratic Party and the elections dept. - to go away and hammer out an agreement that would satisfy both, something along the lines of a one day, restricted re-opening of voter registration that would be available to persons who felt they had been scammed by private registration companies.

She told them to cut a deal and to come back in the afternoon. When they came back, there was no discussion of the deal. Instead, the judge ruled from the bench, saying there wasn't a lot of proof.

She said of the five torn up registrations, only two were legitimate and such a small number did not warrant re-opening voter registration. She said she needed more concrete evidence and added, "This will create additional fraud and manipulation."

During the morning hearing, Judge Adair had accepted the premise that egregious acts had been committed by someone in the destruction of registration forms. By later, she said the allegations were unsubstantiated, even though she chose not to hear testimony or to ask questions about other documentation that was offered to the court.

The question that immediately springs to mind is what happened between the morning and afternoon sessions? Who got to Judge Adair? But the real kicker is at the very end of the story.

A spokesman for the Democratic Party said, "The judge invited those individual voters who were disenfranchised to file their own suits, which, if it occurs, could drag out this dispute well beyond the election." It appears unlikely the party will appeal any further. [Emphasis added.]

And that is why we are screwed. Why November 2 no longer matters. Because even holding physical proof of voter fraud by the GOPpers, still, as soon as they hit resistance, the Dummycrats just gave up. Folded. Threw in the towel. Cried "uncle." In the face of this egregious miscarriage of justice wherein the judge ignored her own actions of that very same morning, ignored the very deal she called on the parties to work out, and made a judgment without hearing testimony or asking questions, they just caved, collapsed, without even making a fuss.

Just like they did during the Clinton years (Does the name Lani Guinier ring any bells?), just like they did in 2000, just like they've done ever since. So why is it that we're supposed to think this collection of butt-kissing surrender monkeys is going to save us from anything? We are screwed.

Oh, they'll deny it, oh, they'll puff their chests and talk about taking on "the tough issues," but win or lose, in the end it won't mean a thing. And of course if Bushleague does win, you know damn well who will get blamed. Despite the fraud and disenfranchisement in Nevada, in Ohio, in Arizona, in Florida, in other states, despite the Dums craven refusal to stand against it and call a crook a crook and a power-mad thief a power-mad thief, if Shrub wins, every possible attempt will be made to blame - you guessed it - Ralph Nader. His 1% or 1.5% of the vote will be poked, prodded, plucked and picked at, dissected, its entrails read, to find any way to argue that this state or that state "would have" gone for Kerry had it not been for Nader.

The New York Times is already laying the groundwork.

With less than three weeks before the election, Ralph Nader is emerging as just the threat that Democrats feared, with a potential to tip the balance in up to nine states where President Bush and Senator John Kerry are running neck and neck. ...

Polls show that he could influence the outcomes in nine by drawing support from Mr. Kerry. They are Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Wisconsin.

The problem with this is that according to their own figures, that statement simply does not hold up. The chart with the article shows average poll figures for Bush, Kerry, and Nader in those nine states. We're going to assume that the polls are accurate (that is, ignore margins of error, otherwise it becomes impossible to say the figures mean anything at all, which quite possibly they don't) and to maximize Nader's effect on Kerry, we're also going to assume that every single vote for Nader is a vote that would go to Kerry if Nader was not on the ballot. They wouldn't vote for Bush, they wouldn't vote for David Cobb or Walt Brown or even Michael Badnarik or some other 3rd party, and they wouldn't not vote. That is a clearly untenable assumption, but we're going to make it anyway.

Even with those assumptions, this is what the chart shows: In three states (IA, ME, NH), Kerry is ahead. So Nader's vote can't "tip the balance" to Bush there. In four more (CO, FL, NV, WI), Bush is ahead by a margin greater than Nader's vote, so even with those votes, Kerry would still lose the state. No "tipping" there, either. Only in two states (MN, NM) could Nader's vote make a difference. Yes, that is two states. But it's not nine.

But it doesn't matter. The Nader-haters are rushing to grab on to every straw they can to blame him for their own and their own candidate's failures and escalating their rhetoric with each blast. Now Eric Alterman, who has become such a Democratic Party bootlicker that I have lost all respect for him, refers to what he calls Nader's "malevolent megalomania" and pats himself on the back for doing a speaking tour "in the hopes of undoing some of the damage done to our election discourse by lies of Ralph Nader."

This is not analysis any more than is repeating the hoary, discredited myth that Nader is why Gore lost the 2000 election, a myth that I've noted before even the Democrats know is bull. No, this is venomous personal hatred rooted in paranoia and moral cowardice that will talk tough about fighting Republican thug tactics but when push actually comes to shove, even in the courts, prefers to slink away, muttering about the old days and madly pointing fingers everywhere but at themselves and the people actually guilty.

We are so flaming screwed.

Footnote: If you'd like to hear what Nader is about in his own words rather than from the scum farmers, you can go to the interview he did with Democracy Now!; the link is here. I'll just note here that a "safe states" strategy for a presidential campaign can be good for grassroots party-building, which is why I was in favor of the Green Party doing just that. But Nader says his goal is to directly challenge the two-party monopoly at the national (Congressional-Presidential) level, which is a rather different goal. In that case, those who demand that he stay out of swing states are demonstrating an embarrassing ignorance of political action because they are in fact demanding that he only campaign in those areas where he can be completely and safely ignored. Which of course would be utterly pointless.