Geez Paul Krugman lies a lot

The man is a guaranteed Fisking, it is really lazy work for a blogger. Now his latest attack is claiming BOTH of the last two presidential elections are fraudulent. Of course he only manages this through innuendo and half truths. For example:

Two different news media consortiums reviewed Florida's ballots; both found that a full manual recount would have given the election to Mr. Gore. This was true despite a host of efforts by state and local officials to suppress likely Gore votes, most notably Ms. Harris's "felon purge," which disenfranchised large numbers of valid voters.

Of course what he is leaving out is that these "media consortiums" only said that this might have happened in certain scenarios, NONE of which were called for by the Gore campaign. Krugman's very own newspaper, which he apparently never reads reported:

Contrary to what many partisans of former Vice President Al Gore have charged, the United States Supreme Court did not award an election to Mr. Bush that otherwise would have been won by Mr. Gore. A close examination of the ballots found that Mr. Bush would have retained a slender margin over Mr. Gore if the Florida court's order to recount more than 43,000 ballots had not been reversed by the United States Supreme Court.

Even under the strategy that Mr. Gore pursued at the beginning of the Florida standoff filing suit to force hand recounts in four predominantly Democratic counties Mr. Bush would have kept his lead, according to the ballot review conducted for a consortium of news organizations.

But the consortium, looking at a broader group of rejected ballots than those covered in the court decisions, 175,010 in all, found that Mr. Gore might have won if the courts had ordered a full statewide recount of all the rejected ballots. This also assumes that county canvassing boards would have reached the same conclusions about the disputed ballots that the consortium's independent observers did. The findings indicate that Mr. Gore might have eked out a victory if he had pursued in court a course like the one he publicly advocated when he called on the state to "count all the votes."

And of course he refers to Ms. Harris' s "felon purge" which was not her purge at all, it was called for by the state legislature in response to previous problems with vote fraud and contracted out to a private company. Apparently Mr. Krugman believes you are just supposed to ignore laws passed by the legislative branch. Furthermore anyone who was removed from the lists was allowed to appeal it, and many counties just ignored the lists anyway. Because of this it is entirely possible that more (Democratic leaning) felons were illegally allowed to vote than those who were removed improperly (who statistically should be equally represented)

But both reports show that votes were suppressed by long lines at polling places - lines caused by inadequate numbers of voting machines - and that these lines occurred disproportionately in areas likely to vote Democratic.

Only Krugman could somehow turn long lines into "suppression" of voting. Does this mean if there is a line at my grocery store checkout, it is not because more people showed up to shop then the store planned for at that time, it is because Safeway is intentionally "suppressing" their sales? How can an economist believe in this logic? Long lines are not a sign of vote suppression, they are a sign of the exact opposite, large amounts of people showing up to vote! Furthermore elections are normally run by local officials, who in "areas likely to vote Democratic" would be DEMOCRATS. They are "suppressing" their own vote!

Both reports also point to problems involving voters who were improperly forced to cast provisional votes, many of which were discarded.

Of course he fails to note that this was a nationwide problem, look here at Washington State, even 6 months after the election they were still trying to determine the validity of provisional ballots. Statistically speaking Ohio was one of the better states.

The Conyers report goes further, highlighting the blatant partisanship of election officials. In particular, the behavior of Ohio's secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell - who supervised the election while serving as co-chairman of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio - makes Ms. Harris's actions in 2000 seem mild by comparison.

How interesting, quoting from a Democratic report on the partisanship of a Republican. Doesn't that sound a little "partisan"? Now why is he so viciously attacking Blackwell, could it be because he is a popular African-American Republican politician who is considered a front runner for governer next year? At least he didn't call him "inscrutable"

And of course the biggest thing he omits from this article, is that despite the thousands of lawyers working for the Democratic party looking into this, John Kerry refused to contest it at all. When they voted in the Senate whether to block the certification of the election, it failed 1-74. They could only get one senator, not even Ted Kennedy would go along with these theories. But I guess inspector Krugman knows better.

UPDATE: Brainster finds yet one more conveniently inaccurate fact. I am sure there will be more.

UPDATE 2: BTW if anyone was interested in Andrew Gumbel, the journalist for the Independent who wrote this "very judicious work" he is a far left journalist who writes for anti-war groups, and whose writing, among other places has shown up at Al Jazeera. He even wrote a book on the secret conspiracy behind the Oklahoma City bombings. I think it was Karl Rove...