tainted

The St. Paul Pioneer Press sees fit today to run a Jan. 5 Wall Street Journal editorial on the Minnesota U.S. Senate recount that nearly everyone but Rush Limbaugh has laughed off for its woolly inaccuracies and hidebound misrepresentations. Does the PiPress editorial staff let stand the errors that their WSJ counterparts committed to print two days [...]

Heard beneath Friday’s hubbub over the vote count in Mountain Iron, Minn., was the advancement of a related Republican argument — that by offering reasons why a recount in the U.S. Senate election should go forward Democrats are insulting Minnesota’s election system and its election officials. What was implicit in U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman’s remarks Nov. 5, prominent Republican commentator Sarah Janecek made explicit Nov. 7, first by writing that when Democrats say they want to “ensure votes properly cast are properly counted,” they’re really out to “smear our elections process.” Later, she told a public television audience, “I’m pretty sickened by that.” In the meantime, Coleman’s campaign manager applied words like “dubious” and “tainted” to the current canvassing process.