...in which the blogger has fun with John Fund.

A week ago I made my second studio appearance on "Extension 720," [1] Chicago radio legend Milt Rosenberg's evening panel discussion, which airs on WGN and is syndicated nationally. The Wall Street Journal's John Fund was a call-in guest, discussing his rehashed volume Stealing Elections and propagandizing on the phony crisis [2] fraud. (Listen to former Republican U.S. attorney David Iglesias [3] discuss why this is all politically motivated attempt to chill voter turnout and intimidate likely Democratic voters, and how he was run out of the Justice Department for refusing to play along.)

It's an argument Fund propagates with sublime cleverness: masquerading as an earnest citizen concerned with all sorts of abuses of the voting system from Republican voter suppression on down, he cunningly deposits his thumb on the scales to make all sorts of absurd false equivalences and made-up outrages sound reasonable. All the while, he slips in near-slanderous claims about prominent progressives and progressive organizations. Which is what he did last Friday night. And then lied about what he had just done.

The podcast hasn't been posted. I made a transcript from the audiotape. Rosenberg, a distinguished and gentlemanly conservative, asked what the issue is all about. Fund:

Well, I think this is a civil rights issue. You know there are two civil rights when it come to voting. The firt civil right i the one we all know about: voters should be free of suppression, they should be free of intimidation, they should be free of fear. We fought a great civil rights struggle in 1960 to be get rid of poll taxes, to get rid of literacy taxes [sic], all kinds of Jim Crow artifacts, and we need to preserve and extend those gains. Everyone agrees on that. I think what we have ignored, and what we have let creep up, is that some of the old bad practices of voter fraud that people in Chicago are certainly aware of in our history are coming back. And never really left us. And that your listeners can be disenfranchised just as easily if someone cancels out their vote because they shouldn't be voting, they're voting twice, they don't even exist, or because the voting systems break down, and bureaucratic bungling, which is akin to malpractice. And that's a civil right to. So I believe we have to focus on both civil rights, and if we don't, we're in danger of having a Florida-style meltdown just like the Al Gore-George Bush race in 2000 where everything degenerated into recounts, and recriminations, and rogue law suits filed by both parties.

Which may, if you know nothing about the subject you haven't learned from Fox News, sound perfectly reasonable. Rosenberg, as if speaking on cue, then asked if federally mandated provisional ballots were particularly risky. Fund again:

Well, I'm in favor in theory of provisional ballots. I think that if we have bureaucrats who don't register people who sign up, whose names aren't on the list, that there should be some safety valve, some mechanism that they can appeal rather than just make a phone call and get hung up on the other end by a bureaucrat. But. I think we have to recognize that we should think in advance the rules for those provisional ballots to avoid controversy and to avoid the meltdown. Let's say Michigan is going to be the state that decides the election, or Pennsylvania. Let's say Obama or McCain has a 20,000-vote lead. Normally that margin of victory would decide who wins that state, if it's close enough, who wins the presidency. Well, what if there are 100,000 provisional votes, in other words 100,000 people have shown up at the polls and said, 'well, I did register.' Or, 'maybe I didn't register but I wanna vote.' And they're all required by law to be handed a provisional ballot. Those ballots are segregated out of the rest of them and they're counted later if they're found valid. Well, I can assure you, if Michigan or Pennsylvania's differences are 20,000 votes, and there are 100,000 provisional ballots in each state, all of the lawyers for both sides are going to sue for those 100,000 ballots. Some will say, 'count every vote, even if somebody didn't register, they're over 18, they're an adult, their vote should be counted.'

At which—that old weasel formulation "some say"—Perlstein's ears prick up. Rosenberg comes back, "I gather we have battalions of lawyers, and they're already arrayed—", and Fund interjects, "Yes, and other people will say 'the rule of law should apply, they didn't register,' or, 'we can't find their registration, there's no proof they registered, we shouldn't count it.' So there will be a conflict of visions, a clash of values."

Boy howdy, I think, isn't that interesting. Has Fund just claimed that on one side of the "clash of values" are those who "say 'the rule of law should apply,'" and on the other side are those who say "count every vote"? Has he just opposed those who say "count every vote" to those who prefer "the rule of law"—as if it wasn't implicit that voting rights activists obviously mean "count every vote according to the law"?

And so I inquire:

Hi, John. Uh, a couple of questions for you. Um, as you probably know there's no federal right to vote enumerated in the Constitution, it's something the tenth amendment reserves for the states, each state creates its own system, each county, each precinct creates its own system. I really love Jesse Jackson Jr.'s idea of a constitutional amendment to actually create a federal right to vote Actually create a federal system. And I'd like to know what you think about that. And also, I'd just like to ask you, you, you just said that there are people who want to count the votes of people who aren't registered; I'd like to know who those people are so they we can arrest them. I think you're making that up.

Please read carefully from here on out. Please judge for yourself whether he's accusing anyone of intentionally disregarding the law, or whether I'm over the top. Let me know what you think in the comments:

Fund [indignant]: "I'm sorry?"

Perlstein: "I think you're making that up."

Fund: "Making what up?"

Perlstein: "That there are people who want to count every vote of people who aren't registered."

Fund: "I didn't say that."

Perlstein: "Yes you did. I wrote it down."

Fund: "I didn't say that."

Perlstein [reading notes]: "'There are people who want to count every vote'--check the tape--and 'there are people who want to follow the rule of law.'"

Fund: "Rick!"

Perlstein: "Who doesn't want to follow the rule of law?"

Fund: "Rick, Rick, Rick--"

Perlstein: "You just said that there are people who don't want to follow the rule of law."

Fund: "Rick. Rick. Calm down. Rick--what I said, and I will be able to check the tape too, I said 'there may be some people in those provisional votes, there will be no evidence that they registered to vote, then they claim they have of that they claim that they may wish to vote,' and I can assure you, that when Jesse Jackson led the demonstrations through Florida, there were lots of people who had claimed to register, there was no evidence that they had, there were lots of people who simply wanted to cast votes but weren't allowed to, and his chant was 'count every vote.' I saw Mr. Jackson in the CNN green room the other day, we had a nice conversation, and he believes that we should give every--every!--benefit of the doubt to someone who said they registered even though there is no evidence they did. That is what I said, that is what I meant--"

Perlstein: "So Jesse Jackson does not want to follow the rule of law?"

Fund: "Excuse me. That is what I said, and that is what I meant, and I'm the one who knows what I said, and if you wish to check the tape, that is what I said."

Perlstein: "Well I just want to check one thing. So you said that there are people who 'don't wish to follow the rule of law.' Are you saying that Jesse Jackson--"

Fund: "I didn't say that, Rick."

Perlstein: "Yes, you did."

Fund [shouting]: "No, I did not! Rick! Would you like to go back and look at the transcript? We can do that."

Rosenberg: "Sir--gentlemen, we'll go beyond that. And let me bring--"

Perlstein: "I'll just let it go."

At that our exchange ended; Rosenberg brought in another guest, former Reagan Justice Department official and Illinois Republican activist Joe Morris, who proferred a cleaned-up coloration of what Fund "had said," which little resembled what Fund had said at all.

I consulted with a lawyer, because I was curious if Fund had actionably defamed Jesse Jackson Sr. (not Jesse Jackson Jr., whose Constitutional amendment proposal [4] is an exceptionally sound and potentially effective way to extend the franchise as widely and transparently as possible, which perhaps is why Fund avoided discussing from the Congressman and son in order to invoke to the Reverend and father, because Fund actually has no interest extending the franchise as widely and transparently as possible. So easy enough for FUnd to change the subject: he surely knows that for his constituency, if you've seen one "Jesse Jackson" you've seen 'em all.)

The plain logic of John Fund's words, as I heard them were: some say "count every vote." Others say "follow the rule of law." Q.E.D., those who saying "count every vote" are distinct from those who prefer the rule of law. Refuse to name who he means. Then gratuitously raise the name of Jesse Jackson Sr. who says, in effect, "count every vote," which means, in effect, he disdains the rule of law.

Well, this is what my lawyer said: Fund's words fall just on the safe side of slander and defamation law. Which is perhaps what Fund's own lawyer told him. Which may be why he said precisely what he said in precisely the way he said it.

What do you think?