foley_edward“Mr. Franken now goes to the Senate having effectively stolen an election,” pronounced the Wall Street Journal’s editorialists today. Election-law expert Edward Foley was quick to respond: “[T]his election was about as far from ‘stolen’ as any extraordinarily close and intensely disputed election could be — and to use that term in this context is to rob it of appropriate meaning for those situations in which election officials abuse their power to throw an election for a preferred candidate, thereby robbing an opponent of a rightful victory.”

The WSJ editorial page has consistently proven itself rich soil for baseless critiques of Minnesota’s election and recount process. But your television set still provides the best, terrarium-like conditions in which words may flourish independently of their meanings, as Media Matters demonstrates in its take on Fox News coverage of Tuesday’s Norm Coleman-Al Franken denouement.

[Via Election Law Blog]