Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 election & Why They’ll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them) – Mark Crispin Miller
Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 election & Why They’ll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them) – Mark Crispin Miller, Basic Books/Perseus Books Group (2005) 364pp. (S) ****
Three days after the 2004 election, this reviewer wrote the following regarding some of its prominent features:
1) A large turnout during an incumbent's "re-election" bid (I still use the term loosely, but cautiously when addressing the 2004 election), historically is an indication of voter dissatisfaction with the incumbent's first term performance.
2) Wide discrepancies between exit polls and final vote tallies in critical precincts are a red flag to the possibility of vote manipulation and fraud. (Yes, and the media assault on the validity and accuracy of exit polls, I believe to be part of the on-going effort, inspired by the administration, to sow the seeds of doubt in any mechanism that challenges the results they don't like [i.e. an iconoclastic endeavor that's target has been the "liberal" media, and is now the integrity of the elections infrastructure itself, the last stumbling block to fully realized, un-checked power]).
3) The "moral character" (and remember who we're speaking of here) factor is a fabricated myth designed to inform/instruct the American public how we are SUPPOSED to now perceive our "leader". When did you hear of the "character/morals" issue being polled PRIOR to the election? In an economic downturn, wartime where the draft looms on the horizon, worsening domestic conditions w/ re. to health insurance access, diminishing education funding, and eroding environmental protections, not to mention the barge loads of lies, disingenuousness, dissembling, and out right deceit that's been all par for the Bush course, in a country where voters typically vote their "pocketbooks," leaves one just a bit incredulous when hearing of the twenty percent "morals character" vote. The "morals" vote makes about as much sense as Bush having a "mandate" when his challenger captured more votes of any presidential candidate, second only to Bush. Of course, I can not discount the possibility that there may be strange a-doings in Dixie, indeed.
4) Ohio has been one of the hardest hit states with re. to job losses under the Bush agenda (I think to the tune of a quarter million lost). Gut intuition tells me that in the manufacturing belt, where most of Ohio's neighbors went blue (with the exception of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Indiana, where for whatever reasons [cultural taboos, Christian fundamentalist irrationality, a poor education infrastructure that makes the populous vulnerable and susceptible to disinformation campaigns], wedge issues reign supreme), and where more of the population resides in the manufacturing, union based north, and where people were waiting in line for up to ten hours to vote, Ohio went to Kerry. But then add to the mix the fact that the Governor of Ohio, Bob Taft, is a Republican, that his Secretary of State (Kenneth Blackwell) was a member of the CHENEY/bush re-election apparatus, and that a year and a half ago CEO of Diebold and CHENEY/bush fund-raising pioneer Walden O'dell pledged his intent to "deliver Ohio for Bush," and you have just a few cases of rank conflict
of interest - to put it nicely. It stinks, it stinks bad.
5) This one is the real kicker. Upwards of 45 million American voters (of a total of 115 million) voted on touch-screen, paperless voting machines - no physical confirmation, no paper, no trail, no fingerprints, no sanity, just, what has become the key-note of the Bush era, "faith". It's the perfect crime. These machines were employed in thirty states.
So given all this, with all the indicators against him that have proven historically accurate, Bush captures an unprecedented "victory" (i.e. gaining more votes than any presidential candidate in U.S. history). I guess this is more of the "up is down, black is white, earth is flat" type of inverted, anti-Enlightenment "thinking" we've come to expect in the post Florida 2000, Bush era. I'm not buying it, and those of you who still believe in the integrity of science, in reason, logic, and truth - the bedrock of Western civilization, shouldn't either.
The good news is that Bev Harris at www.blackboxvoting.org is leading the charge with one of the largest FOIA actions in history, to get access to these machines, crack them open and get a good look at those unseen, internal "irregularities". If I weren't so broke myself, I'd be soliciting contributions on their behalf, but I thought just by getting the word out, this may give some of you solace.
Of course, things are very serious (yes, it is textbook fascism, as I've been saying since the 2002 mid-terms, or "theocratic fascism" if you prefer, when you allow for the fundamentalist fanaticism of "Christian reconstructionists" [Mike Malloy's term] - or is it deconstructionists?, or perhaps more accurately, revisionists), but I thought I'd try to get out some good news, especially knowing that one of the left's tendencies is to beat up on itself with recriminations and "what ifs" (I find counterpunch.org to be one the most insidious, perpetually negative, and unhelpful examples of this, enough so for me to seriously question their funding base). In my opinion, John Kerry and John Edwards ran a fine campaign, honorable and gentlemanly, especially when given they were up against some of the most shameless, loathsome, tactics I've ever witnessed (hey, the cat's now out of the bag, the "architect" was finally acknowledged and saluted, PUBLICLY), and all of you who volunteered with the campaign or the GOTV effort can feel very proud. To quote again Mike Malloy on Air America, "IT'S THE MACHINES!" We did nothing wrong and gave our best. Fifty-five million Americans can't be wrong!”(11/04)
Today, the only addition I’d make is that like Florida 2000, Fox News was the first to call Ohio for Bush. Déjà vu all over again, indeed. A year later, much of the above is recognized by Miller as well as his making additional observations. In his first chapter, “The Miracle,” Miller cites Bush’s low approval ratings, polling lower than Kerry, prior, and for sometime, to election day. He also notes that several prominent Republicans, like the genuine, fiscal conservatives that are nowhere to be found in the Bush II administration, publicly endorsed Kerry in many of the nation’s editorial pages. Additionally, many newspapers that had endorsed Bush in 2000, changed their position in 2004 by backing Kerry. Lastly, Miller notes the strong unity within the Democratic party, especially when compared to a fractious right where “cultural” evangelical rightists uncomfortably sat next to more moderate, fiscal conservatives, the kind, as just stated, that was more likely to back Kerry, having absolutely no representation within the Bush administration. Given this, could Kerry really have lost a fair election? If anything, the 2004 presidential election can be best characterized as an aberrant event, and as Miller declares, oddly, all the anomalies seemed to singularly favor Bush.
A part of Miller’s approach is to explore, for lack of a better word, the “cultural” elements of what is known to most people as the neo-conservative right. In this breakdown, he notes two examples; the Clarence Thomas nomination hearings to the Supreme Court and the personage of Tom Delay. “The ‘defensive’ drives for Thomas and Delay anticipated the Republican campaign to deny the party’s theft of the 2004 election – in its vast subversion of American democracy, the culmination of the party’s prior paranoid campaigns.”(p.79) A large part of this denial, is the psychology of victimization that prominently plays in right-wing circles, so that whatever is done in the name of politics, it is justified because the self-conceptualization is of being of the lesser party. The other psychological aspect in play here is “projection.” “Here [is] Republican projection at its purest – for as we have seen, the disingenuous ‘pre-emptive strike’ was, is, and will always remain the central tactic of the regime’s military policy and domestic politics, the two being therefore often difficult to tell apart.”(p.111)
Then there is this master stoke from Miller: “The aim [of the evangelical right] is not to master politics but to annihilate it.”(p.81) This is the iconoclastic mission as noted by this reviewer previously. The idea is not to play within the rules of ordinary political discourse, but to exceed the boundaries of propriety and in so doing, cast doubt on the very legitimacy of the political structure itself. One example of this is how Bush himself is perceived by his fanatical base. Surely, he is not viewed as a mere mortal civil servant, pulling a check supplied by the taxpayer, but instead he is seen as someone other than, be it someone divinely appointed to office, as Bush himself has hinted, or as someone whose role approaches that of the demagogue who can do no wrong. This fact alone, that a fanatical base by definition in any democracy, will always have no more than a minority status, informs the reasoned reader that Bush could not have possibly legitimately won the 2004 election. It is only when this fanaticism, seizes power and maintains it, that history informs us a democracy is transformed into something else, i.e. theocracy, autocracy, fascism.
Miller has put together and written an excellent book. He has assembled many examples of Republican abuse, far too many to cite here in a cursory review. In his book, he is performing an invaluable service to a public that needs to wake up soon if America is to be prevented from descending into the hellish throes of totalitarianism. Few writers today have the guts to call a spade a spade, fearful of the possible repercussions what a spineless group of chickenhawks, in their sadistic, powermad imagination might decide to mete out against him. By going to the root of the matter, Miller doesn’t mince words. I’ll end with this: “ . . . [the Bush] regime is essentially anti-secular, anti-rational, anti-republican, anti-democratic, ironically posing as a champion of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ throughout the world.”(p.198) Irony can kill; what else needs to be said?
Three days after the 2004 election, this reviewer wrote the following regarding some of its prominent features:
1) A large turnout during an incumbent's "re-election" bid (I still use the term loosely, but cautiously when addressing the 2004 election), historically is an indication of voter dissatisfaction with the incumbent's first term performance.
2) Wide discrepancies between exit polls and final vote tallies in critical precincts are a red flag to the possibility of vote manipulation and fraud. (Yes, and the media assault on the validity and accuracy of exit polls, I believe to be part of the on-going effort, inspired by the administration, to sow the seeds of doubt in any mechanism that challenges the results they don't like [i.e. an iconoclastic endeavor that's target has been the "liberal" media, and is now the integrity of the elections infrastructure itself, the last stumbling block to fully realized, un-checked power]).
3) The "moral character" (and remember who we're speaking of here) factor is a fabricated myth designed to inform/instruct the American public how we are SUPPOSED to now perceive our "leader". When did you hear of the "character/morals" issue being polled PRIOR to the election? In an economic downturn, wartime where the draft looms on the horizon, worsening domestic conditions w/ re. to health insurance access, diminishing education funding, and eroding environmental protections, not to mention the barge loads of lies, disingenuousness, dissembling, and out right deceit that's been all par for the Bush course, in a country where voters typically vote their "pocketbooks," leaves one just a bit incredulous when hearing of the twenty percent "morals character" vote. The "morals" vote makes about as much sense as Bush having a "mandate" when his challenger captured more votes of any presidential candidate, second only to Bush. Of course, I can not discount the possibility that there may be strange a-doings in Dixie, indeed.
4) Ohio has been one of the hardest hit states with re. to job losses under the Bush agenda (I think to the tune of a quarter million lost). Gut intuition tells me that in the manufacturing belt, where most of Ohio's neighbors went blue (with the exception of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Indiana, where for whatever reasons [cultural taboos, Christian fundamentalist irrationality, a poor education infrastructure that makes the populous vulnerable and susceptible to disinformation campaigns], wedge issues reign supreme), and where more of the population resides in the manufacturing, union based north, and where people were waiting in line for up to ten hours to vote, Ohio went to Kerry. But then add to the mix the fact that the Governor of Ohio, Bob Taft, is a Republican, that his Secretary of State (Kenneth Blackwell) was a member of the CHENEY/bush re-election apparatus, and that a year and a half ago CEO of Diebold and CHENEY/bush fund-raising pioneer Walden O'dell pledged his intent to "deliver Ohio for Bush," and you have just a few cases of rank conflict
of interest - to put it nicely. It stinks, it stinks bad.
5) This one is the real kicker. Upwards of 45 million American voters (of a total of 115 million) voted on touch-screen, paperless voting machines - no physical confirmation, no paper, no trail, no fingerprints, no sanity, just, what has become the key-note of the Bush era, "faith". It's the perfect crime. These machines were employed in thirty states.
So given all this, with all the indicators against him that have proven historically accurate, Bush captures an unprecedented "victory" (i.e. gaining more votes than any presidential candidate in U.S. history). I guess this is more of the "up is down, black is white, earth is flat" type of inverted, anti-Enlightenment "thinking" we've come to expect in the post Florida 2000, Bush era. I'm not buying it, and those of you who still believe in the integrity of science, in reason, logic, and truth - the bedrock of Western civilization, shouldn't either.
The good news is that Bev Harris at www.blackboxvoting.org is leading the charge with one of the largest FOIA actions in history, to get access to these machines, crack them open and get a good look at those unseen, internal "irregularities". If I weren't so broke myself, I'd be soliciting contributions on their behalf, but I thought just by getting the word out, this may give some of you solace.
Of course, things are very serious (yes, it is textbook fascism, as I've been saying since the 2002 mid-terms, or "theocratic fascism" if you prefer, when you allow for the fundamentalist fanaticism of "Christian reconstructionists" [Mike Malloy's term] - or is it deconstructionists?, or perhaps more accurately, revisionists), but I thought I'd try to get out some good news, especially knowing that one of the left's tendencies is to beat up on itself with recriminations and "what ifs" (I find counterpunch.org to be one the most insidious, perpetually negative, and unhelpful examples of this, enough so for me to seriously question their funding base). In my opinion, John Kerry and John Edwards ran a fine campaign, honorable and gentlemanly, especially when given they were up against some of the most shameless, loathsome, tactics I've ever witnessed (hey, the cat's now out of the bag, the "architect" was finally acknowledged and saluted, PUBLICLY), and all of you who volunteered with the campaign or the GOTV effort can feel very proud. To quote again Mike Malloy on Air America, "IT'S THE MACHINES!" We did nothing wrong and gave our best. Fifty-five million Americans can't be wrong!”(11/04)
Today, the only addition I’d make is that like Florida 2000, Fox News was the first to call Ohio for Bush. Déjà vu all over again, indeed. A year later, much of the above is recognized by Miller as well as his making additional observations. In his first chapter, “The Miracle,” Miller cites Bush’s low approval ratings, polling lower than Kerry, prior, and for sometime, to election day. He also notes that several prominent Republicans, like the genuine, fiscal conservatives that are nowhere to be found in the Bush II administration, publicly endorsed Kerry in many of the nation’s editorial pages. Additionally, many newspapers that had endorsed Bush in 2000, changed their position in 2004 by backing Kerry. Lastly, Miller notes the strong unity within the Democratic party, especially when compared to a fractious right where “cultural” evangelical rightists uncomfortably sat next to more moderate, fiscal conservatives, the kind, as just stated, that was more likely to back Kerry, having absolutely no representation within the Bush administration. Given this, could Kerry really have lost a fair election? If anything, the 2004 presidential election can be best characterized as an aberrant event, and as Miller declares, oddly, all the anomalies seemed to singularly favor Bush.
A part of Miller’s approach is to explore, for lack of a better word, the “cultural” elements of what is known to most people as the neo-conservative right. In this breakdown, he notes two examples; the Clarence Thomas nomination hearings to the Supreme Court and the personage of Tom Delay. “The ‘defensive’ drives for Thomas and Delay anticipated the Republican campaign to deny the party’s theft of the 2004 election – in its vast subversion of American democracy, the culmination of the party’s prior paranoid campaigns.”(p.79) A large part of this denial, is the psychology of victimization that prominently plays in right-wing circles, so that whatever is done in the name of politics, it is justified because the self-conceptualization is of being of the lesser party. The other psychological aspect in play here is “projection.” “Here [is] Republican projection at its purest – for as we have seen, the disingenuous ‘pre-emptive strike’ was, is, and will always remain the central tactic of the regime’s military policy and domestic politics, the two being therefore often difficult to tell apart.”(p.111)
Then there is this master stoke from Miller: “The aim [of the evangelical right] is not to master politics but to annihilate it.”(p.81) This is the iconoclastic mission as noted by this reviewer previously. The idea is not to play within the rules of ordinary political discourse, but to exceed the boundaries of propriety and in so doing, cast doubt on the very legitimacy of the political structure itself. One example of this is how Bush himself is perceived by his fanatical base. Surely, he is not viewed as a mere mortal civil servant, pulling a check supplied by the taxpayer, but instead he is seen as someone other than, be it someone divinely appointed to office, as Bush himself has hinted, or as someone whose role approaches that of the demagogue who can do no wrong. This fact alone, that a fanatical base by definition in any democracy, will always have no more than a minority status, informs the reasoned reader that Bush could not have possibly legitimately won the 2004 election. It is only when this fanaticism, seizes power and maintains it, that history informs us a democracy is transformed into something else, i.e. theocracy, autocracy, fascism.
Miller has put together and written an excellent book. He has assembled many examples of Republican abuse, far too many to cite here in a cursory review. In his book, he is performing an invaluable service to a public that needs to wake up soon if America is to be prevented from descending into the hellish throes of totalitarianism. Few writers today have the guts to call a spade a spade, fearful of the possible repercussions what a spineless group of chickenhawks, in their sadistic, powermad imagination might decide to mete out against him. By going to the root of the matter, Miller doesn’t mince words. I’ll end with this: “ . . . [the Bush] regime is essentially anti-secular, anti-rational, anti-republican, anti-democratic, ironically posing as a champion of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ throughout the world.”(p.198) Irony can kill; what else needs to be said?
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