Political Football

Below, find only a small clip of this week’s cover story of the WEEKLY STANDARD magazine. If you want to understand the Bush Derangement Syndrome read the entire LONG article here. I’ve posted snips below –

……. At the same time that Conason is looking back to a fictional past in America, Naomi Wolf–last heard from in 2000 advising Al Gore to dress in earth tones–is looking back to a real past in Europe, and seeing troubling parallels. In 4,600 overwrought words, she explained to the readers of the Guardian that there are ten steps to “Fascist America” and Bush is taking them all.

Bush has whipped up a menace (the war on terror); created “a prison system outside the rule of law” (Guantánamo, to which public dissidents, including “clergy and journalists” will be sent “soon enough”); developed “a thug caste … groups of scary young men out to terrorize citizens” (young Republican staffers who supposedly “menaced poll workers” during the 2000 recount in Florida); set up an “internal surveillance system” (NSA scanning for phone calls to and from terrorists). An airtight case, this, and leading to just one conclusion: “Beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable … that it can happen here.”

Well, this explains many things. It explains why poor Cindy Sheehan is now sitting in prison; why Bush critics like CIA retiree Valerie Plame have been ostracized by the corporate media and are wasting away in anonymity; why no critic of Bush can get a hearing, why no book complaining about him can ever get published, and why our multiplexes are filled with one pro-Bush propaganda movie after another, glorifying the Iraq war and rallying the nation behind its leader.

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, Cindy Sheehan is running for Congress; Valerie Plame is rich and famous; the young Republican “thugs” made all of one appearance seven years ago–chanting “Let us in!” when Miami-Dade County vote counters planned to move to a small inner room with no observers present; and press censorship is now so far-reaching that you can’t even expose a legal, effective, and top-secret plan to trace terrorists without getting a Pulitzer Prize.

“What if the publisher of a major U.S. newspaper were charged with treason or espionage?” Wolf asks breathlessly. “What if he or she got 10 years in jail?” Well, journalists have been harassed, pressed for their sources, and threatened with prison, but not by George W. Bush and his people. Back in the real world, only one prominent journalist has been jailed by the federal government in recent memory, and that was Judith Miller, imprisoned for 80-plus days for contempt by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, the great hero of the anti-Bush forces for having indicted Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff.

Such is life here in Fascist America. Of course, some think that the coup took place some time back, in the form of two, three, even four stolen elections over the span of six years. In 2000, they agree, the election was -stolen by the Supreme Court, after Governor Jeb Bush and other Republicans in Florida had systematically disenfranchised liberal voters through misleading ballots, illegal purges, faulty machines, and long lines.

After 2002, most had moved on to a different fixation: the touch-screen electronic voting machines that they thought had been secretly programmed to tip key elections to conservatives. “There is strong evidence that Kerry won the popular vote [in the 2004 election],” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the Progressive before the 2006 midterms. “There were easily three million votes that were shifted… There were 80,000 Democratic voters in twelve western Ohio rural counties who cast a vote for Kerry and had their votes shifted…  In six other counties there were tens of thousands of Kerry voters who had their votes shifted to Bush.”

……………… Democratic pollster Mark Blumenthal, at his Mystery Pollster blog, unraveled the myth of the exit polls that Kennedy described as “exquisitely accurate.” To the contrary, he reported, they were error-prone, unreliable, and had a record in the past four presidential elections of tipping heavily to the Democrats’ side: in 1988, they exaggerated the Democrats’ vote by 2.2 points; in 1992 by 5.0 points, by 2.2 points again four years later, and in 2000 by 1.8. In 2004, the spread was 6.5 points, barely higher than it was in 1992, the difference being that the candidate projected as being the winner then was the one who in the end won.

Blumenthal noted that “Senior election officials from the Carter Center have repeatedly advised against the use of exit polls in election monitoring in Central American countries, calling them ‘risky,’ ‘unreliable,’ and ‘misleading’” and that an election project funded by the U.N. and the U.S. Agency for International Development had concluded, “The majority of exit polls carried out in European countries over the past years have been failures… One might think there is no reason why voters in stable democracies should conceal or lie about how they have voted … but they do.” Joe Andrews, a chairman of the Democratic National Committee in the late 1990s, has repeatedly noted that touch-screen machines really help Democrats, by making voting easier for their constituent groups, including disabled and elderly voters.

——— really! if you have the time read it all here

or download a pdf of the article below

(right click on link below, then SAVE LINK AS)
bush-derangement-syndrome-explained.pdf

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