Nbadan
11-30-2004, 03:50 AM
NOVEMBER 15, 2004 – My, my, my. Look at the non-Moderate Independent media at work.
People who believe our elections should have integrity are ‘conspiracy theorists.’ George W. Bush’s winning margin is historically large, the first actual majority in ages. John Kerry – and his horrible, borderline psychotic wife – ran a horrible campaign. George Bush ran a smart campaign and won thanks to the ‘values vote.’
This is the world of the non-M/I media, and this is the filter America gets its information through. And with all of the above, we are just talking about the mainstream non-Moderate Independent media. For Fox, Limbaugh, Hannity, etc. it is even better.
People who believe our elections should have integrity are ‘lefties,’ ‘liberals,’ or part of a ‘radical fringe.’ George W. Bush’s victory was a massive ‘mandate.’ And John Kerry – and his horrible, over-the-borderline psychotic wife – not only ran a terrible campaign, but were terrible candidates (even if she wasn't actually one,) and terrible people. Bush ran a brilliant campaign and won thanks to the fact that America is an evangelical Christian dominated nation.
This is the world of the Fox/Limbaughians.
All of this ‘perspective’ and coverage simply shows once again that the entire non-M/I media is nothing but a battle of right-wing and right-winger. So, for the sake of having somebody deal with all of these issues from a place called reality and a perspective called American, let me take a moment to set a few things straight.
People who believe our elections should have integrity, that people should actually both get to vote and have their votes accurately counted, are not of any particular party, they are of all parties. Those who pretend people battling over the election’s results are just sore losers trying to come up with conspiracy theories obviously have missed the last four years.
You know, those four years during which these same people – people like the ones over at www.blackboxvoting.org – have been saying it looks like the fix is in. This is not something people dreamt up on election night as things started to be called for Bush, as the entire non-M/I media is making it out to be. It is nice they have just found www.blackboxvoting.org and finally acknowledged the existence of its founder, but that doesn’t change the fact that for the past four years she and top scientists from top universities and millions upon millions of Americans have been battling against paperless e-voting, because the system quite simply lacks integrity, as it leaves no verifiable paper trail.
This would be bad enough alone if it wasn’t for the second part of this reality: Bush Republicans fought, went to court, and even legislated in places like Florida not to only ensure there would be no paper trail for the e-voting, but that doing a recount would be forbidden by law.
A little odd?
We got an e-mail from blackboxvoting.org a while back, asking us if we might put their information – the info that explains why the e-voting machines we used were in no way safe or secure - up on our server, as they were having server after server shut down by the authorities. We didn’t know what to make of them or the claim about websites being shut down, so we didn’t help out. But we read their material, and it, in detail, laid out the problems with e-voting.
So for four years there has been the clear statement that the setup was not one with integrity, and the fact that the Bush Republicans were going to such great lengths to ensure that our elections would be operated on electronic machines with no paper trail brought alarm to millions – even if the non-M/I media and the Democratic Party chose not to deal with it.
You had the easily fixable machines, on which 40 million of the votes this past election were cast. Then you had the fact that the man responsible for programming and making most of them was not just a Bush supporter, but a high-level Bush campaign operative who happened to be from Ohio and who openly, publicly promised to do whatever necessary to deliver Ohio to Bush.
You may not have been paying attention, but it doesn’t change the fact that millions of Kerry supporters were very concerned going into the election that no matter what success they actually had, the vote was going to be fixed. Not after the fact, before the fact. And no, not due to paranoia, but due to the simple facts laid out above which should have had all Americans who care about the integrity of our elections in great alarm.
As if all of this wasn’t bad enough, election night came, and the exit polling said one thing while the vote tallies said something entirely opposite. And errors and problems popped up by the thousands, and all of them had one thing in common: they all tilted things in favor of Bush. Not one machine took a Bush vote and registered it Kerry, not one precinct accidentally gave Kerry some extra thousands of votes, not one mostly Republican precinct had its voters stuck standing in line for 7-10 hours. Not one. But in thousands of reported cases this occurred the opposite way.
The millions of people now demanding recounts and blogging away over the voting issues did everything possible to ensure this scenario never happened. They wanted – as the Bush side of things claims to want now – simply to be able to have a vote and go with the results. But reality is reality.
And the reality is that: the voting technology used was fixable; the man in charge of the company who made and programmed most of the e-voting machines was one campaign’s operative; and – again, this actually occurred – the exit polls said something entirely opposite of what the election tally said. If you need all this in greater detail, try this report from a Ph.D. expert on the subject from the University of Pennsylvania - all the info on exactly how the exit polls were skewed, etc. are analyzed in this. For example, check out this chart:
http://moderateindependent.com/table2.jpg
His conclusion: fraud or mistabulation is, "an unavoidable hypothesis, one that it is the responsibility of the media, academia, polling agencies, and the public to investigate."
To look at facts and decide that 2 plus 2 might just equal four is not radical, and it has nothing to do with left, right, or center. A detective who spots something suspicious and follows up on a lead is not suddenly called a “leftist.” He is called someone doing his job.
And, despite the expected non-M/I media’s usual bullying and name calling, that’s exactly what the election count battle is.
Next: The idea that George W. Bush won some sort of ‘mandate,’ and the constant pointing out of how this is the first time in a long time that a President has won an actual majority – and so that must mean this was a real big showing for Bush – is just more of the same name calling-type nonsense.
The non-M/I media knows just as well as we do that George W. Bush’s margin of victory was among the smallest in our entire nation’s history, and that his “majority” victory was among the most pathetic of margins. Sure, the last time a President won a true majority was in 1988, but that was because in 1992 a major third-party candidate, Ross Perot, ran and got about 20 percent of the vote, and in 1996 he ran again and got almost 10 percent. In 2000 we had the last Bush election mess, where he didn’t win the popular vote at all, never mind a majority.
So you see, the fact that it has been a while since a President has won with an actual majority in no way means that Bush’s 51% this time would be a big victory. Everyone knows this. 51% is an extremely slim margin of victory, one of the smallest percentages for a president to get in our nation’s history, and all the media outlets pretending it means something else are, yet again, just bullying and trying to force a legitimacy on a election that can not be legitimate until several questions are resolved – if they can even be resolved, thanks to the entirely unverifiable setup the Bush Republicans worked so hard to arrange.
Next: every media outlet out there is bashing John Kerry’s campaign, or at least picking it apart. Newsweek is even going after his wife viscously. While these stories may be fair game enough (and we have our share of Kerry campaign stories as well, which we will share shortly,) not one of these outlets has hit the real story about what a disastrous failure Bush’s campaign was.
An incumbent President in time of war with a massive propaganda machine and a campaign money war chest bigger than any before in history barely manages to survive. He ran a horrible campaign, which began during his first day in office, instituting policies even his most fervent supporters couldn’t go along with without holding their noses, such as his reckless deficit spending and the asinine unilateral, pre-emptive venture into Iraq.
His performances in the debates, in particular in the first debate, were not just poor, not even just bad, but historically horrible. Children throughout the ages will watch the first debate between John Kerry and George W. Bush and watch in awe as the nation’s official president shows himself to truly be the mentally incompetent puppet people joked about all along, the man who was afraid to testify in front of Congress without having Cheney there to hold his hand, the man who never held free form press conferences. The closely guarded secret of Bush’s bizarre lack of temperamental control and clear lack of mental ability got past the handlers this time.
His campaign could never rise above the gutter, and hung itself around a few constantly repeated lies and personal smears and clung desperately to the biggest failure to protect the homeland in the history of our nation, the tragedy of 9/11, as a desperate effort to scare people into not so much voting for the President’s re-election, but making them too afraid to consider change.
And so a mainly wooden, northeastern, left-leaning moderate at the very least almost – if not actually – cleaned the clock of a sitting president in time of war. If Bush had had any success while in office and run a half way decent campaign, the election would not have been close.
As for the ‘values’ vote, that term, of course, is being happily misused, just as labels like “liberal” are constantly misused with glee. First off, the ‘values’ vote the media is talking about is truly the amoral, overly self-righteous hypocritical bigot vote. Hating gays while approving of killing children with increased air pollution is not a ‘values’ vote. Just because people claim to have ‘moral values’ obviously doesn’t mean it. The actual values vote was split between the parties, as some people on each side put what were truly matters of moral principle – for some, standing up against abortion, for others, standing up against the killing of innocents through horrible environmental policy and horrible acts of war – before other issues in choosing their candidate.
And, as has been pointed out, that even the self-righteous hypocritical, “We have values,” voters did not do anything so much more massive than they have done in the past, turning out, when the numbers are looked at, in about the same proportion as usual.
What did help President Bush – in fact, what has been his most important base – was a group the non-M/I media pretends doesn’t even exist: the proudly amoral vote, which also can be referred to as the ‘bad boy’ vote. This is the central strength of the Bush coalition. The guys who say, “My Hummer is going to give people asthma and make global warming happen sooner? Cool, I’ll buy two.” The people who say, “We tortured people in Iraq? Great, I just wish I could have helped out.” The ones who said, “I don’t care if we lied to attack Iraq just so we could take the oil – as long as I get cheap oil, I really don’t care.”
Yes, these are the people the rest of the media pretend don’t exist – and that is exactly what these ‘proudly amorals’ love so much. They get to be this scummy yet, at the same time, brag that they are the truly righteous ones, the ones with ‘values.’ They boastingly call themselves ‘conservatives,’ by which they mean ‘the ones with values,’ and then sit around insulting anyone who takes a moral stand on any issue. These people were the true base that gave Bush any chance of competing at all.
They love the fact that their news stations and President lie, because they get away with it. It’s great fun for them. They love that they get to claim to be pious while their Vice President swears on the floor of the Senate like a school yard punk. Most of all, they love that they can do or say whatever they want and yet still be dubbed the good ones, the moral ones, and still win. This is President Bush and his base, and the only correct label to call them is Machiavellian anarchists, people who truly take pride in not having respect for laws or treaty, but instead just like the laws of “the strongest rules” and “might makes right.” Treaties, international conventions, the Constitution, forget it if they stand in their way. Polluting kids lungs? Waa waa waa, taunt people who care about such wimpy things. Racism? You bet it’s fun, even more fun to do when people let you pretend you are not doing what you are doing.
This has been to key for the GOP, and this is what has led our nation in the direction it has gone – even if the rest of the media doesn’t want to acknowledge that these people not just exist, but are a huge segment of our population.
So to sum up: People who believe our elections should have integrity are simply good Americans doing their duty. George W. Bush’s victory was miniscule and questionable. John Kerry – and his wife – ran a campaign that can be critiqued, but so did President Bush. And it was not the values vote but the 'proudly amoral' vote, the Machiavellian anarchists, who were Bush's strongest core of support.
Well there you have it, the actual world – and the one the rest of the media refuses to or is incapable of – or, more accurately, deliberately avoids – acknowledging.
That’s okay, this is why we exist. Somebody has to put truth and what is best for America above political spin and ratings. Somebody has to speak from America’s True Voice.
Moderate Independent (http://moderateindependent.com/v2i21bico.htm)
People who believe our elections should have integrity are ‘conspiracy theorists.’ George W. Bush’s winning margin is historically large, the first actual majority in ages. John Kerry – and his horrible, borderline psychotic wife – ran a horrible campaign. George Bush ran a smart campaign and won thanks to the ‘values vote.’
This is the world of the non-M/I media, and this is the filter America gets its information through. And with all of the above, we are just talking about the mainstream non-Moderate Independent media. For Fox, Limbaugh, Hannity, etc. it is even better.
People who believe our elections should have integrity are ‘lefties,’ ‘liberals,’ or part of a ‘radical fringe.’ George W. Bush’s victory was a massive ‘mandate.’ And John Kerry – and his horrible, over-the-borderline psychotic wife – not only ran a terrible campaign, but were terrible candidates (even if she wasn't actually one,) and terrible people. Bush ran a brilliant campaign and won thanks to the fact that America is an evangelical Christian dominated nation.
This is the world of the Fox/Limbaughians.
All of this ‘perspective’ and coverage simply shows once again that the entire non-M/I media is nothing but a battle of right-wing and right-winger. So, for the sake of having somebody deal with all of these issues from a place called reality and a perspective called American, let me take a moment to set a few things straight.
People who believe our elections should have integrity, that people should actually both get to vote and have their votes accurately counted, are not of any particular party, they are of all parties. Those who pretend people battling over the election’s results are just sore losers trying to come up with conspiracy theories obviously have missed the last four years.
You know, those four years during which these same people – people like the ones over at www.blackboxvoting.org – have been saying it looks like the fix is in. This is not something people dreamt up on election night as things started to be called for Bush, as the entire non-M/I media is making it out to be. It is nice they have just found www.blackboxvoting.org and finally acknowledged the existence of its founder, but that doesn’t change the fact that for the past four years she and top scientists from top universities and millions upon millions of Americans have been battling against paperless e-voting, because the system quite simply lacks integrity, as it leaves no verifiable paper trail.
This would be bad enough alone if it wasn’t for the second part of this reality: Bush Republicans fought, went to court, and even legislated in places like Florida not to only ensure there would be no paper trail for the e-voting, but that doing a recount would be forbidden by law.
A little odd?
We got an e-mail from blackboxvoting.org a while back, asking us if we might put their information – the info that explains why the e-voting machines we used were in no way safe or secure - up on our server, as they were having server after server shut down by the authorities. We didn’t know what to make of them or the claim about websites being shut down, so we didn’t help out. But we read their material, and it, in detail, laid out the problems with e-voting.
So for four years there has been the clear statement that the setup was not one with integrity, and the fact that the Bush Republicans were going to such great lengths to ensure that our elections would be operated on electronic machines with no paper trail brought alarm to millions – even if the non-M/I media and the Democratic Party chose not to deal with it.
You had the easily fixable machines, on which 40 million of the votes this past election were cast. Then you had the fact that the man responsible for programming and making most of them was not just a Bush supporter, but a high-level Bush campaign operative who happened to be from Ohio and who openly, publicly promised to do whatever necessary to deliver Ohio to Bush.
You may not have been paying attention, but it doesn’t change the fact that millions of Kerry supporters were very concerned going into the election that no matter what success they actually had, the vote was going to be fixed. Not after the fact, before the fact. And no, not due to paranoia, but due to the simple facts laid out above which should have had all Americans who care about the integrity of our elections in great alarm.
As if all of this wasn’t bad enough, election night came, and the exit polling said one thing while the vote tallies said something entirely opposite. And errors and problems popped up by the thousands, and all of them had one thing in common: they all tilted things in favor of Bush. Not one machine took a Bush vote and registered it Kerry, not one precinct accidentally gave Kerry some extra thousands of votes, not one mostly Republican precinct had its voters stuck standing in line for 7-10 hours. Not one. But in thousands of reported cases this occurred the opposite way.
The millions of people now demanding recounts and blogging away over the voting issues did everything possible to ensure this scenario never happened. They wanted – as the Bush side of things claims to want now – simply to be able to have a vote and go with the results. But reality is reality.
And the reality is that: the voting technology used was fixable; the man in charge of the company who made and programmed most of the e-voting machines was one campaign’s operative; and – again, this actually occurred – the exit polls said something entirely opposite of what the election tally said. If you need all this in greater detail, try this report from a Ph.D. expert on the subject from the University of Pennsylvania - all the info on exactly how the exit polls were skewed, etc. are analyzed in this. For example, check out this chart:
http://moderateindependent.com/table2.jpg
His conclusion: fraud or mistabulation is, "an unavoidable hypothesis, one that it is the responsibility of the media, academia, polling agencies, and the public to investigate."
To look at facts and decide that 2 plus 2 might just equal four is not radical, and it has nothing to do with left, right, or center. A detective who spots something suspicious and follows up on a lead is not suddenly called a “leftist.” He is called someone doing his job.
And, despite the expected non-M/I media’s usual bullying and name calling, that’s exactly what the election count battle is.
Next: The idea that George W. Bush won some sort of ‘mandate,’ and the constant pointing out of how this is the first time in a long time that a President has won an actual majority – and so that must mean this was a real big showing for Bush – is just more of the same name calling-type nonsense.
The non-M/I media knows just as well as we do that George W. Bush’s margin of victory was among the smallest in our entire nation’s history, and that his “majority” victory was among the most pathetic of margins. Sure, the last time a President won a true majority was in 1988, but that was because in 1992 a major third-party candidate, Ross Perot, ran and got about 20 percent of the vote, and in 1996 he ran again and got almost 10 percent. In 2000 we had the last Bush election mess, where he didn’t win the popular vote at all, never mind a majority.
So you see, the fact that it has been a while since a President has won with an actual majority in no way means that Bush’s 51% this time would be a big victory. Everyone knows this. 51% is an extremely slim margin of victory, one of the smallest percentages for a president to get in our nation’s history, and all the media outlets pretending it means something else are, yet again, just bullying and trying to force a legitimacy on a election that can not be legitimate until several questions are resolved – if they can even be resolved, thanks to the entirely unverifiable setup the Bush Republicans worked so hard to arrange.
Next: every media outlet out there is bashing John Kerry’s campaign, or at least picking it apart. Newsweek is even going after his wife viscously. While these stories may be fair game enough (and we have our share of Kerry campaign stories as well, which we will share shortly,) not one of these outlets has hit the real story about what a disastrous failure Bush’s campaign was.
An incumbent President in time of war with a massive propaganda machine and a campaign money war chest bigger than any before in history barely manages to survive. He ran a horrible campaign, which began during his first day in office, instituting policies even his most fervent supporters couldn’t go along with without holding their noses, such as his reckless deficit spending and the asinine unilateral, pre-emptive venture into Iraq.
His performances in the debates, in particular in the first debate, were not just poor, not even just bad, but historically horrible. Children throughout the ages will watch the first debate between John Kerry and George W. Bush and watch in awe as the nation’s official president shows himself to truly be the mentally incompetent puppet people joked about all along, the man who was afraid to testify in front of Congress without having Cheney there to hold his hand, the man who never held free form press conferences. The closely guarded secret of Bush’s bizarre lack of temperamental control and clear lack of mental ability got past the handlers this time.
His campaign could never rise above the gutter, and hung itself around a few constantly repeated lies and personal smears and clung desperately to the biggest failure to protect the homeland in the history of our nation, the tragedy of 9/11, as a desperate effort to scare people into not so much voting for the President’s re-election, but making them too afraid to consider change.
And so a mainly wooden, northeastern, left-leaning moderate at the very least almost – if not actually – cleaned the clock of a sitting president in time of war. If Bush had had any success while in office and run a half way decent campaign, the election would not have been close.
As for the ‘values’ vote, that term, of course, is being happily misused, just as labels like “liberal” are constantly misused with glee. First off, the ‘values’ vote the media is talking about is truly the amoral, overly self-righteous hypocritical bigot vote. Hating gays while approving of killing children with increased air pollution is not a ‘values’ vote. Just because people claim to have ‘moral values’ obviously doesn’t mean it. The actual values vote was split between the parties, as some people on each side put what were truly matters of moral principle – for some, standing up against abortion, for others, standing up against the killing of innocents through horrible environmental policy and horrible acts of war – before other issues in choosing their candidate.
And, as has been pointed out, that even the self-righteous hypocritical, “We have values,” voters did not do anything so much more massive than they have done in the past, turning out, when the numbers are looked at, in about the same proportion as usual.
What did help President Bush – in fact, what has been his most important base – was a group the non-M/I media pretends doesn’t even exist: the proudly amoral vote, which also can be referred to as the ‘bad boy’ vote. This is the central strength of the Bush coalition. The guys who say, “My Hummer is going to give people asthma and make global warming happen sooner? Cool, I’ll buy two.” The people who say, “We tortured people in Iraq? Great, I just wish I could have helped out.” The ones who said, “I don’t care if we lied to attack Iraq just so we could take the oil – as long as I get cheap oil, I really don’t care.”
Yes, these are the people the rest of the media pretend don’t exist – and that is exactly what these ‘proudly amorals’ love so much. They get to be this scummy yet, at the same time, brag that they are the truly righteous ones, the ones with ‘values.’ They boastingly call themselves ‘conservatives,’ by which they mean ‘the ones with values,’ and then sit around insulting anyone who takes a moral stand on any issue. These people were the true base that gave Bush any chance of competing at all.
They love the fact that their news stations and President lie, because they get away with it. It’s great fun for them. They love that they get to claim to be pious while their Vice President swears on the floor of the Senate like a school yard punk. Most of all, they love that they can do or say whatever they want and yet still be dubbed the good ones, the moral ones, and still win. This is President Bush and his base, and the only correct label to call them is Machiavellian anarchists, people who truly take pride in not having respect for laws or treaty, but instead just like the laws of “the strongest rules” and “might makes right.” Treaties, international conventions, the Constitution, forget it if they stand in their way. Polluting kids lungs? Waa waa waa, taunt people who care about such wimpy things. Racism? You bet it’s fun, even more fun to do when people let you pretend you are not doing what you are doing.
This has been to key for the GOP, and this is what has led our nation in the direction it has gone – even if the rest of the media doesn’t want to acknowledge that these people not just exist, but are a huge segment of our population.
So to sum up: People who believe our elections should have integrity are simply good Americans doing their duty. George W. Bush’s victory was miniscule and questionable. John Kerry – and his wife – ran a campaign that can be critiqued, but so did President Bush. And it was not the values vote but the 'proudly amoral' vote, the Machiavellian anarchists, who were Bush's strongest core of support.
Well there you have it, the actual world – and the one the rest of the media refuses to or is incapable of – or, more accurately, deliberately avoids – acknowledging.
That’s okay, this is why we exist. Somebody has to put truth and what is best for America above political spin and ratings. Somebody has to speak from America’s True Voice.
Moderate Independent (http://moderateindependent.com/v2i21bico.htm)