MoveOn.Org is casting about for support in its effort to throw suspicion on the election outcome. An email to its peeps says, “Question are swirling around whether the election was conducted fairly or not.” Also, I’ve heard anecdotal evidence that inside the Kerry family, the legitimacy of the outcome is not entirely believed. MoveOn’s email links readers to a Nov. 5 letter from six members of Congress asking the Government Accountability Office to investigate irregularities in Florida (Palm Beach and Broward county), Ohio (Warren county), Nebraska (Sarper county), and North Carolina (Guilford). The letter also directs the comptroller to complaints lodged at a website, voteprotect.org.

letter to David Walker, Comptroller

Oh, as they say, it’s probably nothing. Okay, they only say that when it’s about to become something, but so far this seems to be just a little case of sour grapes.

The Washington Post carries a fairly shocking editorial this morning. In regard to Alberto Gonzales’s appointment to Justice, they write: “We respect some of his views, particularly his stance on affirmative action, for the same reason that conservatives might have opposed his nomination to the bench.”

Get that? The Washington Post respects some of his views–namely the ones with which they already agree. There’s a word to describe that sort of outlook: provincialism.

But let’s leave the Post aside for a moment and ask the following, impolite, question: In the last 50 years, which U.S. president has done the most to promote minority leadership in America?

The answer is George W. Bush, by a mile and a half. Bush has given America a black secretary of State, a black national security adviser, a Chinese secretary of labor, and now a Latino attorney general. This president has promoted minorities–and women–at every opportunity during his tenure. He has given tacit support of legal affirmative action and has clearly conducted his own, informal, quest to make certain minorities are in positions of great power within his own administration. It is obvious that at a personal level, it is important to George W. Bush that his administration looks like America.

Let’s leave aside the question of whether or not all of this is for the good. The real question is, will Bush ever get credit from minority grievance groups for doing more for the cause of minority leadership than any president in recent history?

Just kidding. What I find funny about Rall’s latest tantrum (which sounds unsettlingly like Mike Kinsley’s rant on the same topic) is that Rall assumes that actual Democrats agree with him.

Everyone caught up in this monstrous Red / Blue divide misses, I think, the essential point: Only a very tiny percentage of Americans would have found themselves rendered incontinent by either result last Tuesday. Most Republicans would have been fine, if unhappy, with a Kerry presidency. Just as most Democrats are, I suspect, fine, if unhappy, with Bush’s reelection. What Rall and Kinsley and the rest of the leftist hysterics don’t understand is that 48 percent of the country doesn’t actually agree with them on anything more than the narrow preference for Kerry over Bush. Most of the 48 percent of Americans who voted for Kerry aren’t going to leave the country, don’t hate their Republican-voting neighbors, and don’t think the world is coming to an end.

The Rall-Moore-Kinsley left is a much, much tinier minority than they suppose.

Hugh Hewitt keeps fighting the good fight for Arlen Specter. In his latest essay he fast-forwards four years to see what might happen if Republicans throw Specter overboard now. Thankfully, I think this fight is all but won.

Curious story about N. Va teen who sues the bullies who made his high school years a living hell. Washington Post

No one thinks more highly of Michael Kinsley’s intellect than I do. Only someone as smart as he is could have made such a lucrative career from out-thinking themselves. In his latest effort he implores Republican readers: “There’s just one little request I have. If it’s not too much trouble, of course. Call me profoundly misguided if you want. Call me immoral if you must. But could you please stop calling me arrogant and elitist?”

Is this crazy, or what? Objectively speaking, Kinsely is supremely arrogant and elitist. That’s his whole schtick! This is like Tom Brady asking sportswriters to stop calling him accurate and calm under pressure.

Chris Wavrin notes that the Kerry ’08 idea is bunk. And he’s right. The days when a candidate could lose a presidential election and live to run again are over, if for no other reason than presidential campaigns have become so expensive, that a party simply can’t afford to trust one to a man who’s already crashed and burned.

He’s so good that I read this assault on my faith:

I was instructed . . . that the Enlightenment had come to an end, by no less an expert than Garry Wills, who makes at least one of his many livings by being an Augustinian Roman Catholic.

I step lightly over the ancient history of Wills’ church (which was the originator of the counter-Enlightenment and then the patron of fascism in Europe) as well as over its more recent and local history (as the patron, protector, and financier of child-rape in the United States, and the sponsor of the cruel “annulment” of Joe Kennedy’s and John Kerry’s first marriages). As far as I know, all religions and all churches are equally demented in their belief in divine intervention, divine intercession, or even the existence of the divine in the first place.

And I don’t even notice that he’s slagging off on the Church I hold so dear. Well, I notice, but I don’t really mind it. The difference between a polemicist and a hack is that when the former wields a rapier, you can admire the artistry even if you’re the target.

Hitch is that good.