Election Results

Election day is over, and so is the recovery. Kevin Zeese lost in Maryland by a substantial margin, garnering roughly 1½% of the vote. It was sad to see so much effort by people who really care about radical politics come to such a conclusion. However, as he says in his election night talk, this is the beginning of something.

This candidacy was all but perfect: The policies were right, the candidate was impeccable, the two major parties were both polling abysmally low, and three other parties all rallied to a single flag. The high point was when Kevin smashed open the debates, drawing cheers from all comers regardless of their partisan ties. So if the stars were so aligned, why was his ass handed to him?

The machine of our politics is rigged against him. Fair coverage in the media was all but non-existent. For example, that first debate, the one that he won? The Post cut him out of the front-page picture and didn’t mention him until the seventh paragraph. Anecdotes like this abound from my wife’s campaign trail, resulting in a laughable affair in which the media forced the discussion onto puppies and skin color, while the candidate who was talking about real tax reform and real pullout from Iraq and real campaign finance reform was ignored.

To that end, I have lost almost all respect for the Washington Post as an organization of journalistic integrity. I know what the story was, and I could see what they printed. Do they always omit salient facts so blatantly, or only when they have an agenda? Do they ever not have an agenda? How can we know? To paraphrase a former colleague of mine: At least in the era of Yellow Journalism, you knew that everybody was bought and paid for, and by whom.

At the very least, some of the workings of the so-called machine have been exposed or inferred. That can be used to advantage in coming years. And even 1½% is almost 25,000 people. That’s 25,000 people who not only heard the message and agree, but who had the courage to stand up and dismiss the fear mongering and mere rhetoric of the major parties. If each of them were to give a mere $10 in the next election….

Of course, who knows whether the votes were even counted correctly?