Yesterday Hillary Clinton revived the "vast, right-wing conspiracy" accusation, citing interference with voting efforts in New Hampshire in 2002 whose Republican perpetrators have been tried in court and convicted. The first question I have to ask is not Who? or When? or Where? or How? (I think I know Why?) but Does she really think we're going to be suckered by that one?

The crime was Election Day phone-jamming which (while constituting real wrongdoing) is a petty tactic to be rated a conspiracy, let alone a "vast" one. Whether there is more or less to this New Hampshire story, I do not know. A partisan broadside about voting improprieties issued by a Democratic presidential candidate, however, is at best just that -- a partisan broadside. People on all sides play to win at all costs. Just please perish the thought of a Democratic power-broker having the moral or historical standing to sling accusations of a vast conspiracy.

Case in point: Lyndon Johnson "won" election to the Senate in 1948 only because, after he'd been knocked off the ballot in several Texas counties, he called in high-powered attorney Abe Fortas to argue for his reinstatement. Dishonest Abe got LBJ back on and, when it was over, into the Senate. This is the same Abe Fortas whom LBJ would, in 1965, appoint to the United States Supreme Court. Fortas, whose "general view of judging was to find legal authority to support the conclusion to which he was predisposed" (i.e., where opinions are matters of ideology and not law), served only four years until he was forced to resign in disgrace. Details here.

Case in point: Jack Kennedy "won" the 1960 presidential election only because Democratic Mayor Richard Daley delivered Chicago on a silver platter. As Slate's David Greenberg summed up Republican assent to the declared outcome in "Was Nixon Robbed?": "Fearing that to question the results would harm the country, Nixon checked his pride and declined to mount a challenge." (Change "fearing" to "understanding" and change "checked his pride" to "put patriotism above partisanship" and this sentence would be truthful.)

Case in point: A century of voter intimidation, fraud, and domestic terrorism throughout the Dixiecrat South designed either a) to prevent black Americans from voting or b) to guarantee that they would vote for the "right" white ticket. With the possible exception of the Ku Klux Klan itself (many of whose members were Democratic pols anyway), more than any other organization in American history you can point to the Democratic Party's "vast conspiracy" for making black Americans the strategic target, beginning in the 1920s, of Communist Party organizing drives, and, in the 1960s, rendering the South the seedground of the Black Power movement. (Click here for Stokely Carmichael's 1966 speech on behalf of Black Power and declaring his intention to run for president in 1968.) "Disenfranchisement" is the euphemism for this brand of terrorism, a terrorism which bears not a little similarity to the struggles rife in Iraqi civil society today. No wonder liberals anguish over whether to the finish the job of stamping out terrorism over there: they have too many bad memories of their failure to stamp it out over here!

As an aside, here's a blistering piece of political commentary: a Thomas Nast cartoon, "The Democratic Hell-Broth", which, along with W. A. Croffut's poem, truly excoriated the Democratic Party and was featured in the Harper's Weekly pre-election issue of October 31, 1868. Gosh, Nast and Croffut make Ann Coulter seem like Miss Manners! Well -- almost.

Will improprieties and even crimes continue to crop up during the American electoral process? From time to time, sure. But they are by no means the handiwork of a "vast, right-wing conspiracy," nor exclusively of the Republican Party. If anything, they are a hallmark of the Democratic Party.