Mark Crispin Miller: Definitive Analysis Of Latest Stolen Election
Let’s
Get Real
How better to commit the perfect crime than to insist it never happened?
Mark Crispin Miller
Tuesday 23rd November 2004
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.
Mark Crispin Miller
is a professor of media studies at NYU and author, most recently, of
Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney’s New World Order.
The DVD of his new film, A Patriot Act, is available at his Web site.
from In These Times http://www.inthesetimes.com/
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