11.05.2004
i just keep going and going and going...
Some friends and commenters have pointed at these things:
Voting machine error gives Bush 3,893 extra votes in Ohio
"Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry's 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct. Bush's total should have been recorded as 365.
Deducting the erroneous Bush votes from his total could not change the election's outcome, and there were no signs of other errors in Ohio's electronic machines, said Carlo LoParo, spokesman for Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell."
Too many voting ’irregularities’ to be coincidence -- this one questions whether Kerry was a ringer.
"Why didn’t Kerry put up a fight? That in my mind is the most damning evidence proving this was staged election. Why wasn’t Kerry concerned about the Diebold CEO ’committed to delivering’ votes to Bush? Why wasn’t he demanding a fair and transparent election process all year long? Why wasn’t he concerned with the private corporations controlling our voting process? Millions of regular Americans knew of the potential for fraud, computer security experts have testified that this system is so open to fraud it’s insane that anyone would even suggest it’s secure, but Kerry and the Democrats never considered demanding a paper trail? What are they, stupid? Or corrupt?"
Why not? Just sticking some propellers in the tinfoil hat here. (Possibly tellingly,) I'm having an easier time coming up with reasons this last is unlikely than I've had coming up with reasons to assume there was no fraud. But at this point I'm just dumping this info. out here. I'm getting ready to start a separate section here, as I probably mentioned yesterday, to keep track of all of this.
I brought myself down here, wearing my tinfoil hat, planning on putting up the document my friend submitted to me two days ago. I'm still determined to at least get it up tonight; might not link it yet. So I sat down here and there was an e-mail from Jim with one of those links and a comment from Corwin with another. I can't not at least peruse the things.
As I've said before, this must be how the members of the lunatic fringe are birthed. I don't know what to make of anything right now, least of all myself and my inability to ignore this.
For a year now I've been reading, at odd times, whenever the mood strikes, Fear and Loathing in America, which is a collection of Hunter S. Thompson's letters spanning 1968 through 1976. When I picked it up today I found that I last read up to the page with a letter from September 17, 1972. Two letters later I found myself reading this editor's note about a letter he wrote on December 17, 1972:
"Richard Nixon had been reelected in a landslide with 60.7 percent of the popular vote, carrying forty-nine states and winning 521 electoral votes to George McGovern's 17. The 'youth vote' the Democrats had counted on failed to turn out: fewer than half of America's newly enfranchised eighteen to twenty-one-year-olds voted, and those who did split evenly between Nixon and McGovern."
No real similarities there; I imagine if Dubya had scored that kind of win he'd have had his press conference hanging from the Capital Building's steeple-thingy, shouting, "I'm king of the world!" Maybe rounding up Michael Moore and Al Franken and putting their heads on stakes out on the lawn.
But I wondered while I read it, "Wow, what must that have felt like?" I thought I was disheartened after this close an election, but that sort of margin...
Speaking of Nixon, Watergate.info has some good information about that scandal. Here's something interesting: "The aftermath of Watergate ushered in changes in campaign finance reform and a more aggressive attitude by the media." I wonder if the media has channeled that aggressive attitude in a different direction at this point. Fuck, I don't know.
I'm making some headway in my goal of understanding why some thinking people have continued to support Bush after his administration lied about their proof of WMDs. Here's a good post by extrasonic; read the comments to see where I'm narrowing in, I think, on figuring out this disconnect. (Here are my previous comments about the disconnect I see.) Of course I'm only speaking for myself, and Dan's only speaking for himself, but at least I'm seeing that this could very well come down to a question of degrees. Whereas his thinking is that the ends justify the means, I'm focused on the fact that that kind of thinking is dangerous. (Don't trust what I've just said as a good reduction of his viewpoint; it's way oversimplified. Read the stuff if you've got time.)
And, finally, the mudslinging's over...
(Well, I'm pretty sure what I'm doing isn't really mud-slinging... at any rate thanks Bess, Again, for the pictures and the text for the not-quite-caption.)
