Greg Palast- Master Of Logic.

Yay, more fun from Comment is Worthless, this time from veteran conspiracy nut Greg Palast. Palast has uncovered electoral fraud in Mexico. His 'reasoning' appears to be:

a) It is a close election.
b) The right wing candidate won.
c) Er, um, Bush, Florida disenfranchisement er.


Honestly even the Observer's hit piece on Hans Rausing looks sophisticated by comparison.

The PAN-controlled official electoral commission, not surprisingly, has announced that the presidential tally is too close to call.

Yes Greg, that's because it is er close.

Calderón's election is openly supported by the Bush administration.

This sentence is actually a stand alone paragraph, I assume this is meant to be damning evidence.

On the ground in Mexico city, our news team reports accusations from inside the Obrador campaign that operatives of the PAN had access to voter files that are supposed to be the sole property of the nation's electoral commission. We are not surprised.

Of course you aren't surprised, what else are they going to tell someone who claims electoral fraud at every opportunity? Palast is a gifthorse to anyone who wants to throw mud at their opponent.

as in the US, first in Florida, then in Ohio, the exit polls are at odds with "official" polls.

This is because they are 'polls' ie surveys with margins of error and a reliance on accurate self reporting by the respondents. The idea that a small discrepancy between exit polls and election results is evidence of fraud is patently absurd.

In November 2004, the US Republican Senator Richard Lugar, in Kiev, cited the divergence of exit polls and official polls as solid evidence of "blatant fraud" in the vote count in Ukraine. As a result, the Bush administration refused to recognise the Ukraine government's official vote tally - proving once again that republicans are incapable of irony.

Mexico, Florida and Ohio were all predicted to be very tight races with little separating the candidates. In Ukraine the candidate who was 11 points behind in the polls won by 3%.proving once again that Palst is incapable of counting (and of course the accusations of fraud were not based soley on the polls). In fairness to the Guardian most of their readers seem to recognise Palast as a clown, particularly the Mexican ones.

Of course Mexico has had a history of electoral corruption, the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party*) was in power for over 80 years before Vicente Fox won six years ago. Naturally Palast doesn't touch on the gross fraud of the Mexican left staying in power for most of the 20th century. If anyone was ever in need of a good Turkey slapping it is Palast.

* As PJ O'Rourke once said, Institutional Revolutionary Party just sounds like a list of bad things.