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November 03, 2004
Election 2004 Rant
(I rant on a bit in this one) Things don’t look good for the Democrats, the United States, or the world. Regardless of real uncertainties, the American public is once again being swayed by GOP hubris, and essentially telling the world that Bush has won. The Kerry campaign can see the writing on the wall. As last time, any attempt to determine the “true outcome” of the election, whatever that means anymore, would be construed in the halls of Public Opinion as being.
“So do you think it was rigged or not?” Myra called to me from the bedroom this morning.
“I don’t know,” I say. And I don’t.
Now, I don’t necessarily mistrust all or even any of the voter tallies I now see on my television screen. But, sadly, I have no reason to trust any of them either. There was tremendous opportunity for voter fraud in this election, and likely we will never be certain of the true outcome.
It all came down to Ohio. At the time of this writing, Ohio reports 136,483 more counted for Bush than for Kerry. Now, that is a decent margin, assuming all those votes are valid. And, it would probably be a tall order to fraudulently create that many votes for one candidate in one state. But, with an estimated 150,000 uncounted provisional, and tens of thousands of uncounted military absentee ballots the margin could be much narrower.
That said, it is hard to put out of my mind the words of Walden O’Dell, CEO of Diebold, the company which made the electronic voting machines used in many of the state’s election districts. A powerful asset to the Bush campaign, O’Dell wrote in an August 2003 fund-raising letter that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes for the president.”
None of the electronic voting machines in Ohio provide a paper ballots. The state mandated that voting machines provide a paper ballot in time for the 2006 election. Many other electronic voting systems across the country also do not provide a paper ballot.
Granted, according to the counted votes, Bush won the national popular vote by a margin of about 3 million.
But, the electoral vote—the only thing that really counts in this country, as we learned in the 2000 election— is dependent on Ohio.
It is evident that in the future we will able to trust that the counted votes reflect the real intentions of all who voted only in elections determined by margins of 10 or even 20 percentage points.Trumbull, Conn., Novermber 3, 2004, 10:35 a.m.— Struggling for a distraction from what would become very bad news, this morning I took a break from the election coverage by turning to the History Channel, which was airing a program about John F. Kennedy’s presidential.
As I watch footage of the southern segregationists greeting the Freedom Riders’ buses with shouts, bats, homemade clubs, and chains, I am reminded of images of the 2000 election. When the results of that presidential election were still in question, crowds of screaming Republicans shouted down Democrats. The only difference is that instead of wielding clubs, they weilded Bush 2000 signs, American flags, and fashionable effigies of American flags.
“But there is a big difference,” you say. Ah yes, the Southern segregationists in the 1960s were, by and large, members of the Democratic party. Yes, but it was the Civil Rights struggle that transformed the Democratic party, and the politics of the South. The confrontations between the Southern crackers and an alliance of African Americans and their white, liberal sympathizers created an atmosphere of such violent anarchy that JFK — who had heretofor been wary of marginalizing his Southern Democratic base — responded first by sending Federal troops, and then by publicly calling upon Congress to draft civil rights legislation.
The idea that freedom in the United States should apply to all its people created two major reactions by conservative Americans:
They shot JFK’s ass and, over the next five years, assassinated Martin Luther King, Jr. and other key figures of the Civil Rights movement.
They all became Republicans. The Dixiecrats, or conservative Southern Democrats abanoned the party that “betrayed them” and embraced the GOP as the new face of hate.
The American social politics of the nineteenth century — of the Abolitionists verses slaveowners — are still being played out, one hundred and forty years later. It is still the same basic social conflict: an enlightened, largely urban population that believes in freedom for all, verses a so-called “Christian,” largely rural, cracker population that seeks to restrict the freedom of others…in the name of “Freedom.” While the latter group usually claims to be followers of Christ, and to have God on its side (you know, like Osama Bin Laden does?).
So, you see, it’s the same folks really. Perhaps its about time we Northerners swarm back down their and burn their cities down all over again. I was in Brooklyn on 9/11. The twin towers were a mere mile from my house, and when they fell my friends and I had to flee our neighborhood as debris rained down un us, and microscopic fibers of asbestos and other toxins filled our lungs, even with our windows closed. Almost 3000 New Yorkers died that day, and they died for the sins of the rural crackers that put nuts like Bush in power.
I don’t want to see that happen again.
Al Qaida, if you must attack us again, please let it be in Texas or some other cracker state.
IT’S THE IMAGE STUPID
Shifting to a different topic, in many ways, it does not really surprise me that the Democrats lost again.
For, there is a very simple reason GOP candidates have had continued, largely unbridled success over its Democratic counterparts. Over the past 30 years, the Republican party, and its unofficial agents (media pundits I need not name here) have figured out that truth and rigtheousness doesn’t really in modern American political battles.
Naive liberals, and most of the Democratic party, still hold onto the notion that speaking truth to power is somehow connected to winning elections.
Republicans, on the other hand, understand how to speak power to truth. They understand that truth is irrelevant, that truth is what you make it, that truth in the media age simply equals the broadest popular perception of reality
POPULAR PERCEPTION = TRUTH
Those who shout their talking points louder own the truth. Most Democrats still don’t understand that for over 50 years, American public opinion has been driven more by X than by issues, by image rather than by ideals. If you exude enough confidence, the people will believe whatever you tell them. (A nod to Foucault I suppose.) Fox News prematurely declared Bush the winner in 2000, and convinced a large number of Americans that Democratic challenges in Florida were tantamount to their being sore losers. Today, Andrew Card held a press conference, saying “we are convinced that President Bush has won re-election with at least 286 Electoral College votes...In Ohio, President Bush has a lead of at least 140,000 votes. The secretary of state’s office has informed us that this margin is statistically insurmountable, even after the provisional ballots are considered.”
Well, if Andy Card and the Republican secretary of state of Ohio say it, that’s good enough for us. No point in scrutinizing possibilities of voter fraud (though only yesterday it was the GOP crying foul in Ohio, leading the fight to investigate possible fraud).
Card also said, “President Bush’s decisive margin of victory makes this the first presidential election since 1988 in which the winner received a majority of the popular vote.”
All of Card’s words will become truth, regardless of what really happened.
Posted by MJuhre at November 3, 2004 05:30 PM