Silver Lining?
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

These are trying times for Michael Moore fans. Yet the filmmaker himself posted “17 Reasons Not to Slit Your Wrists” on his personal Web site Friday. Here’s number 10: “Five more African Americans were elected as members of Congress, including the return of Cynthia McKinney of Georgia. It’s always good to have more blacks in there fighting for us and doing the job our candidates can’t.” We are not sure what Mr. Moore means by “our candidates,” since we choose to support candidates based on their principles rather than complexions, and we already consider a number of African Americans to be “our candidates.”
Yet Ms. McKinney is emphatically not one of those candidates. Before Georgia voters kicked her out of Congress two years ago, Ms. McKinney accused President Bush of knowing about the September 11 attacks in advance and failing to act so he could gain financially. She cozied up to Alwaleed bin Talal, a Saudi prince, after the latter drew an outrageous connection between Israel and September 11. She decried “U.S.-supported terrorism.” She supports Robert Mugabe’s brutal dictatorship in Zimbabwe, having defended his regime against proposed sanctions on the floor of the House of Representatives. Denise Majette, the state court judge who bested Ms. McKinney in the Democratic primary back in 2002, promised voters, “I won’t embarrass you.”
Now that Ms. McKinney is headed back to Congress, she’s wasting no time in embarrassing the voters of Georgia’s fourth congressional district. “I am one of the silver linings to come out of Election Day 2004 in the United States,” Ms. McKinney wrote in a fund-raising letter released yesterday. “After being driven from my seat in Congress two years ago by a hostile corporate media that seeks to demonize those of us who speak our minds and our hearts against power, the voters of Georgia’s Fourth Congressional District returned me to Washington on November 2nd.”
The representative-elect continued: “But before I get to Washington in January 2005, I ask you to join me in contributing to the Internet newspaper that made a free online media possible in the United States and elsewhere: Narco News.”
Narco News – a Web site published by something called the Fund for Authentic Journalism – reports on developments in the war on drugs from Latin America, a region that is “plastered under the boot of US drug prohibition today,” according to Narco News publisher Al Giordano. Following the election, Mr. Giordano promised his readers to “continue fighting against the anti-democracy tyranny emanating from the North.” In addition to American drug laws, Narco News opposes capitalism and “colonial invaders.”
“We need Narco News, and it needs us,” reads Ms. McKinney’s letter. Other radicals are also happy to see Ms. McKinney back in Congress. Left-wing writer Dave Lindorff, who has devoted a number of columns comparing George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler, found a “bit of silver lining in those post Nov. 2 clouds” in the fact that “Cynthia McKinney, trashed and run out of Congress in 2002 by a right-wing/pro-Israel lobby jihad after raising legitimate questions about the 9-11 attacks, trounced her opponent in Georgia’s 4th District and will return triumphant and unbowed to Congress,” as he wrote on Counterpunch.org.
It may turn out to be reckless for Ms. McKinney’s supporters to toss around the “jihad” label, judging by the tendency of her former campaign contributors, such as Abdurrahman Alamoudi and Sami Al-Arian, to get themselves indicted – and, in the case of Alamoudi, convicted – on terror-related charges. In any case, it’ll be fun watching how New York City’s overwhelmingly Democratic congressional delegation deals with its new colleague. So far we haven’t heard a peep of protest from any of them about Ms. McKinney.