Link to UC Berkley report & Mark Crispin on stolen election 2004

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Fri, 19 Nov 2004 21:53:39 -0800 (PST)

Link to UC Berkley report & Mark Crispin on stolen election 2004

 

 

http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/new_web/VOTE2004/index.html

 

 

November 16, 2004

 

Let's Get Real

 

By Mark Crispin Miller

 

Bush & company's theft of the election was a crime so obvious that it

requires more effort to deny than to affirm. This rip-off was as

flagrant as the L.A. cops' assault on Rodney King, Kerry's stellar

soldiering in Vietnam, or Bush's lousy record in the Texas Air

National Guard, and yet this national calamity is being dismissed as a

delusion.

 

The reason for the Busheviks' denial is as obvious as the theft

itself: How better to commit the perfect crime than to insist it never

happened?

 

And yet what makes this stance so dangerous is not just its use on the

right, but its prevalence throughout the corporate media (MSNBC's

Keith Olbermann excepted) and even among those on the left. To charge

that the Republicans did not legitimately rout the Democrats provokes

the counter-charge that such claims " hurt the cause " by floating angry

fantasy instead of scientific fact.

 

Rather than urge cautiousness, such automatic counter-claims quash all

discussion of electoral fraud, as if the very notion were far-fetched.

" This charge was false, so all charges must be wrong, " is the response

that Karl Rove wants from us, as we will then conclude, conveniently

for him, " Case closed! "

 

A niggling over-focus on particulars is just the attitude that

propagandists seek to cultivate because it helps them cloud the issue.

Thus were a few trivial aspects of John Kerry's military record used

to call that entire record into question. And thus did Rove succeed in

driving journalists away from Bush's scandalous Guard service by

distracting them with the canard that those incriminating documents

revealed by CBS were fakes—or rather, that one of them might not have

been authentic.

 

To let ourselves believe that the " election " was legitimate because

this claim or that has been disproved(apparently) is to not honor

reason. On the contrary, a veritable sea of evidence, statistical as

well as anecdotal and circumstantial, supports the claim that Bush,

again, was not elected by the people.

 

To nod agreement that this was indeed an honest win is to forget how

Bush was shoehorned into office in the first place; to ignore the ease

with which electronic totals can be changed without a trace; to

suppress the fact that Diebold, Sequoia and ES & S—the major

manufacturers of touch screen voting machines and central

tabulators—are owned and run by Bush Republicans, who have made no

secret of their partisan intentions; to deny the value of the exit

polls, which turn out to have been " mistaken " only in the swing

states; to downplay the weird inflation of the Bush vote in county

after county, where the number of votes for president was somehow

higher than the number of voters who turned out; to ignore the bald

chicanery of the Bush supporters who ran the central polling station

in Ohio's Warren County and forced out the press and poll monitors so

they could count the vote in secret; to forget the numerous accounts

of vote fraud coast to coast throughout the prior weeks of early

voting; to overlook the fact that every single " glitch " or " error "

that has been reported favors Bush; to ignore the countless instances

of ballots—absentee, provisional—thrown away or left uncounted; to

forget that the civilian vote abroad (some four million Americans) was

being mishandled by the Pentagon (which had somehow become responsible

for doing the State Department's job); and to ignore the many dirty

tricks reported—the polling places quickly relocated at the last

minute, the fake voter-registration drives, the thousands of Americans

who found themselves not on the rolls, the police road-blocks, the

bullying pro-Bush poll workers, the machines that kept translating

votes for Kerry into votes for Bush. And so on.

 

To forget or ignore all this and to accept—on faith—the mere say-so of

Bush & Company (and our compliant media) is to make clear that you are

not a member of what the Busheviks deride as " the reality-based

community. " Those who help discredit false reports are doing that

community, and this erstwhile democracy, a precious service. But,

those who would abort the whole inquiry in the name of science or

journalistic probity and " closure " are putting that community, and

this nation, at grave risk.

 

http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/1692/