But the point is that "a few" can't manipulate it...it takes a lot of people to accomplish a google bombing.
I didn't say search engines are social software, but rather weblogs that allow trackbacks and pingbacks are. It is this type of networking capabilities that makes concerted publishing efforts possible, and allows those with similar views to joing together into a larger whole.
Search engines are called upon to do a very difficult task. I agree that if you are looking for something and hit a google bomb it is frustrating, but that is also part of doing a proper search. If you wanted to find Gephardt's speech with that quote, then you merely need to include that in the query:
http://www.google.com/search?q=gephardt+miserable+failure+bush&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
You don't get the offfending link. So if you were in fact looking for that and only put in "miserable failure", then it is operator error, not google nor the organized masses fault.